The Kurdish Peace Process and the Question of Political Prisoners: What Demirtaş’s Possible Release Would Mean

Executive summary

In late 2024, the Turkish government opened what it termed a path to a “terror-free Türkiye” — a renewed initiative to resolve the four-decade conflict with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) through disarmament rather than continued military confrontation. That initiative gained significant momentum in 2025 with a public statement from imprisoned PKK founder Abdullah Öcalan calling on the organization to convene a congress and disband. By February 2026, the Turkish parliament’s commission on the peace process had agreed on legal frameworks that could open a path to conditional release for prisoners serving aggravated life sentences, including, potentially, Öcalan himself and former HDP co-chair Selahattin Demirtaş, in prison since November 4, 2016. This post explains where the process now stands, what specifically would have to change for Demirtaş to be released, and what the implications are for the broader category of political prisoners in Turkey.

What’s actually on the table

The peace initiative announced on October 22, 2024 is structurally different from earlier Turkish-Kurdish peace processes (most notably the 2013–15 round, which collapsed). Three components distinguish it:

1. A direct call from Öcalan to disband. From his prison on İmralı island, Öcalan in 2025 publicly called on the PKK to convene a congress and end its armed struggle. The PKK formally renounced armed struggle in 2025 in response. This is the first time the founding leader has issued an unambiguous public disarmament instruction. The cumulative human cost of the conflict — approximately 50,000 lives on both sides over 40 years — has been a central reference point in the public messaging from both sides.
2. Public framing from the ruling coalition. Devlet Bahçeli, leader of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and a senior coalition partner of President Erdoğan’s AKP, publicly called in February 2026 for legal pathways that would allow Öcalan’s release and for Demirtaş to “return home.” This is a notable rhetorical shift from the position Bahçeli held even in 2023.
3. A parliamentary process. A parliamentary commission was established to draft the legal frameworks needed. In February 2026, members of that commission agreed on legal changes that could open the way to conditional release for some prisoners serving aggravated life sentences — built around a principle known in Council of Europe jurisprudence as the “right to hope.”

The “right to hope” principle

The “right to hope” is established in Council of Europe jurisprudence: a person serving a life sentence must have a meaningful chance of sentence review and potential release. Sentences that are de facto permanent without any review mechanism violate Article 3 of the European Convention (prohibition of inhuman or degrading treatment).

Turkey’s “aggravated life imprisonment” sentence has been challenged on this exact ground. Multiple ECtHR judgments have signaled that, as currently structured, Turkish aggravated life sentences are inconsistent with the right to hope.

The legal reform now being drafted in the parliamentary commission would, in essence:

• Establish a periodic review mechanism for aggravated life sentences.
• Define eligibility criteria for conditional release (good conduct, completion of certain rehabilitation requirements, and so on).
• Create a procedural framework for the review hearing, including representation and right of appeal.

The framework would apply, on its face, to all prisoners serving aggravated life sentences. In practice, the political question is which prisoners would actually be released through it.

Why Demirtaş matters

Selahattin Demirtaş is the most internationally recognized Kurdish political figure currently imprisoned in Turkey. He served as co-chair of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) until his detention on November 4, 2016. He was the HDP’s presidential candidate in the 2014 and 2018 elections. He has been imprisoned for nine and a half years.

The European Court of Human Rights has ruled — twice — that his detention violates the European Convention. The Grand Chamber’s 2018 judgment (Demirtaş v. Turkey (No. 2)) found violations of Articles 5 (right to liberty), 10 (freedom of expression), 18 (limits on use of restrictions on rights), and Article 3 of Protocol 1 (free elections). The judgment ordered his release. Turkey has not implemented it.

His case is therefore significant on two distinct dimensions:

• As a domestic political marker: his release would be the clearest possible signal that the political environment around Kurdish-rights advocacy has changed.
• As an international rule-of-law marker: his release would be an act of compliance with a specific binding ECHR judgment that has been outstanding for over seven years.

Both matter. They are not the same thing.

What’s not on the table

It is important to be precise about what the peace process is and is not promising.

• It is not a general amnesty. Reports from the parliamentary commission suggest the framework being drafted would apply to specific categories of life-sentence prisoners, not to all political prisoners.
• It is not a guarantee that Demirtaş or Öcalan would be released. The framework would create a legal pathway; whether the pathway is used depends on subsequent prosecutorial and political decisions.
• It does not address the situation of the 24,000 individuals on trial and 11,640 remanded or convicted prisoners described by the Justice Ministry in connection with alleged Gülen-movement links — a separate category of political prisoner.
• It does not address ongoing prosecutions of journalists, lawyers, students, civil-society staff, or opposition figures (including İmamoğlu) who are not in the “aggravated life sentence” category.

In other words: even in the most optimistic scenario, the peace process would resolve one important category of cases. It would leave most of what AST documents — the everyday prosecutorial machinery against journalists, lawyers, and civil society — largely untouched.

What human-rights organizations are watching

Three specific markers will tell observers whether the process is generating real change:

1. Implementation of Demirtaş v. Turkey (No. 2).* ECHR judgments are binding under Article 46 of the Convention. Implementation would require either Demirtaş’s release through the new framework, or — more directly — a Turkish judicial decision releasing him in compliance with the existing ECHR ruling. Either outcome would resolve a years-long structural non-compliance.
2. Restoration of HDP/DEM Party mayors. The Turkish state replaced dozens of HDP-elected mayors in southeastern provinces with state-appointed trustees (“kayyum”) between 2016 and 2024. Genuine peace would imply restoration of those elected officials, or at minimum their reinstatement on the ballot.
3. Procedural protections for Kurdish-language reporting and political activity. A real shift would be visible in fewer prosecutions under the anti-terrorism law for Kurdish-language journalism, Kurdish cultural events, and Kurdish-rights political speech.

If the legal framework passes but those three indicators do not move, the process is — to use a precise term — symbolic. If they do move, it is structural.

What could derail it

Three risk factors are publicly identified:

• Coalition politics. The AKP-MHP coalition’s continued willingness to support a release framework depends on its electoral calculation. Significant electoral pressure from the right could reverse the rhetorical shift seen from Bahçeli.
• Domestic legal challenges. Parts of the proposed framework will face Constitutional Court review. Given the Constitutional Court’s recent track record (see related AST analysis on ECHR rulings), the outcome of those reviews is not predictable.
• External shocks. Renewed armed conflict — whether in Turkey, in northern Iraq, or in northern Syria — could produce political pressure to reverse course. The 2013–15 process collapsed under exactly such pressure.

Each of these is a real risk, not a hypothetical one.

What the international community can do

European governments and institutions have leverage that is most useful when applied specifically:

• Insist that implementation of Demirtaş v. Turkey*** be a baseline expectation in any bilateral or multilateral framework with Turkey. Not as an aspiration — as a precondition.
• Resume ENGOIA-style monitoring of HDP/DEM Party-area governance. Independent monitoring of how the peace process is being implemented at the municipal level is the most effective check against symbolic-only progress.
• Restore EU accession-process pressure on judicial reform, freedom of expression, and freedom of association. The accession framework was Turkey’s most-effective external constraint during 2003–2010. It can be again.

These are not maximalist asks. They are calibrated to the moment of opportunity that the peace process represents.

The view from AST’s mission

AST documents the people the system has silenced. The Kurdish peace process — if it produces real releases, real restorations of elected officials, real procedural protections — is one of the few mechanisms that could meaningfully reduce the population of silenced people in Turkey. That is a development worth watching closely, supporting where it produces real change, and challenging where it produces only rhetoric.

It is also a moment to remember that the people who would benefit most directly — Demirtaş, Yüksekdağ, Öcalan, and the broader population of Kurdish political prisoners — are individual people with families and decades of advocacy work behind them. The peace process is not an abstraction. It is, at its center, a question about whether named individuals will continue to grow old in prison or be released to participate in public life.

That is the question AST and its partner organizations will keep asking, on every individual case, until it is answered.

How to engage

• Track the parliamentary commission’s output. The legal text of the proposed framework, when published, will be the document that determines what the process actually does.
• Cite the binding ECHR judgments — Demirtaş v. Turkey (No. 2) and others — when the process is discussed in policy or media settings. The international legal record is the most stable reference point.
• Support the DEM Party’s domestic advocacy for resumed peace talks and political prisoner release.
• Expect symbolic moves before structural ones. Watch for the gap.

A renewed Kurdish peace process is, on its terms, the most significant opening in Turkish political-prisoner advocacy since 2015. Whether it becomes the most significant outcome depends on what happens between now and the end of 2026.

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Sources: Turkish Minute, “Erdoğan ally calls for freeing Öcalan, Demirtaş in peace push with PKK” (February 3, 2026); Turkish Minute, “Parliamentary commission backs legal steps that could pave way for Öcalan’s release” (February 4, 2026); European Policy Centre, “Türkiye’s renewed Kurdish peace process: Implications for Europe”; Kurdistan24, “DEM Party: Turkey must release Demirtas, resume peace talks with Ocalan”; PBS NewsHour, “Imprisoned Kurdish leader urges his PKK militant group to disarm”; ECtHR, Demirtaş v. Turkey (No. 2) Grand Chamber judgment (2018).