BirGün reader treated as potential criminal
In İzmir, the conditional release of Abdullah İnan, who sought to benefit from parole, was rejected on the grounds of a report published in BirGün, to which he is a subscriber.
Political prisoner Abdullah İnan, held in İzmir No. 3 T-Type Closed Prison, became eligible for conditional release on 8 August, but the Prison Administration and Observation Board rejected his release on the grounds that he was “not of good conduct.” The justification was a report published in BirGün on 29 December 2016 and calendars belonging to Siirt Municipality.
Şırnak MP Nevroz Uysal Aslan and Siirt MP Sabahat Erdoğan Sarıtaş, who brought the issue before the Parliamentary Human Rights Inquiry Committee, said the decision was arbitrary.
In the petition submitted to the Committee, it was pointed out that İnan’s past disciplinary punishments had been used as the main grounds for rejecting parole, although he had already served those penalties and completed their legal consequences. Re-evaluating them in a way that results in a second restriction of liberty was stated to be unconstitutional.
NEWSPAPER HE NEVER READ BURNED HIS PAROLE
The Prison Administration and Observation Board’s decision on İnan’s rejected release cited the article “Şakran’da insanlık dışı muamele var” (“Inhumane treatment in Şakran”) published in BirGün on 29 December 2016, claiming it targeted prison staff and could “incite hostility among inmates.” In addition, three Siirt Municipality calendars from 2015 were cited as grounds to block release.
Although the materials had not been given to the prisoner at the time, the Board assessed him as if he had read them.
The petition to the Committee stated: “Including these materials in the decision as if the prisoner was personally responsible for their content is nothing more than an attempt to fabricate grounds for extending imprisonment. This approach ignores the legal principle of ‘individual culpability’ and represents an arbitrary punitive practice treating even inaccessible materials as criminal evidence.”
The MPs underlined that although İnan’s progress report explicitly noted that he was of good conduct, he was effectively subjected to a life sentence under the guise of “re-evaluation.” They stated that the conditional release mechanism had been turned into a regime of “indefinite deprivation of liberty.”
Note: This article is translated from the original article titled BirGün okuru potansiyel suçlu sayıldı, published in BirGün newspaper on August 16, 2025.
