Turkey’s governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) on Wednesday submitted a new judicial reform package to parliament that would restart a COVID-era early release scheme and could free an estimated 50,000 to 55,000 inmates, Turkish Minute reported.
The proposal comes as the country faces chronic overcrowding in its prisons and follows a similar plan that circulated during debate on an earlier reform package this year but did not make it into law.
The bill is called the 11th Judicial Package. It expands an emergency measure first used in 2020, when the government allowed prisoners in low-security facilities to move to supervised release early because of COVID. The government now proposes to extend that option to people who committed crimes before July 31, 2023, but whose convictions were not final before that date. Ruling party officials say the measure would allow these inmates to serve the remainder of their sentences outside prison under supervision.
AKP parliamentary group chair Abdullah Güler told reporters that the measure is not an amnesty and said the plan gives eligible inmates three years of early supervised release. Justice Minister Yılmaz Tunç made the same point in Ankara, saying the proposal seeks to correct unequal treatment between inmates who received the COVID benefit in 2020 and others whose trials continued for years.
Turkey’s justice ministry says the country has 395 prisons that hold more than 400,000 inmates, far above their official capacity of about 300,000. The population continued to rise after mass arrests linked to political unrest, including protests over the jailing of İstanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu and ongoing cases against people accused of involvement with the faith-based Gülen movement or with Kurdish political groups.
A similar release mechanism was expected to appear in the 10th Judicial Package that parliament passed in June, but lawmakers removed it from the final text. Legal analysts in Turkey say the government kept working on the plan and moved it into the 11th package after internal debate.
The new bill includes other measures, such as increasing penalties for groups that use children in crimes and introducing prison terms of up to 30 years for leaders of armed groups that recruit minors. It creates a separate crime for stopping vehicles on roads in traffic disputes and calls for sentences of up to three years. The proposed legislation increases penalties for firing guns in residential areas, a practice common at weddings and other celebrations. It also raises sentences in cases of injury by negligence and introduces new rules for cyber fraud, including a requirement that banks use biometric verification for opening new accounts.
The bill allows courts to freeze a bank account for up to 48 hours in suspicious cases. It also lets the Information and Communication Technologies Authority set limits on the number of mobile phone lines a person can acquire. Offenders and operators who exceed the limits may face penalties.
The package also includes rules for inmates with severe mental illness and requires courts to keep these inmates in medical facilities for a minimum period before any decision to release.
Parliament will debate and vote on the bill in the coming weeks.
Rights groups previously criticized the COVID-era release scheme because Turkey kept all inmates convicted under its counterterrorism laws outside the program. Those laws are widely used against political figures, Kurdish activists and people accused of links to the Gülen movement, inspired by the views of the late Muslim scholar Fethullah Gülen.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been targeting followers of the Gülen movement, inspired by the late Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen, since corruption investigations in December 2013 implicated him as well as some members of his family and inner circle.
Dismissing the investigations as a Gülenist coup and a conspiracy against his government, Erdoğan began to target the movement’s members. He designated the movement as a terrorist organization in May 2016 and intensified the crackdown on it following an abortive putsch in July of the same year that he accused Gülen of masterminding. The movement strongly denies involvement in the coup attempt or any terrorist activity.
According to the latest figures from the Justice Ministry, more than 126,000 people have been convicted for alleged links to the movement since 2016, with 11,085 still in prison. Legal proceedings are ongoing for over 24,000 individuals, while another 58,000 remain under active investigation nearly a decade later.
In addition to the thousands who were jailed, scores of other Gülen movement followers had to flee Turkey to avoid the government crackdown.
Human rights groups said the exclusion of terrorism convictions left many political prisoners in crowded facilities, while thousands of other inmates moved to supervised release in 2020.
