Since 25 March 2021, no news has been received from Kurdish People's Leader Abdullah Öcalan, who has been kept under heavy isolation conditions in İmralı Island Prison for more than 25 years. Abdullah Öcalan has been subjected to absolute incommunicado, and his right to see his family and lawyers has been usurped as a whole. With the aggravated isolation in İmralı, the Turkish state, which violates both its own domestic law and international conventions such as the European Convention on Human Rights and the United Nations Convention on the Prevention of Torture, has resorted to disciplinary penalties and bans on lawyer visits, which have no legal equivalent, in order to hide this unlawfulness in the international arena.

On the other hand, international reactions to the ongoing unlawfulness within the scope of the ‘Freedom for Öcalan, a political solution to the Kurdish question’ campaign, which was launched globally on 10 October 2023, continue to rise. Pointing out that the unlawfulness in İmralı is unprecedented in the world, personalities from different social segments demand an end to the isolation in İmralı and the freedom of Abdullah Öcalan.

Most recently, 69 Nobel laureates sent a letter to the High Commissioner of the United Nations Human Rights Council, the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe, the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), drawing attention to the conditions of Abdullah Öcalan asking them to fulfil their obligations to secure his rights.

We asked one of the signatories of the letter, the Nobel Prize-winning French chemist Prof. Jean-Pierre Sauvage, about the global campaign ‘Freedom for Öcalan, a Political Solution to the Kurdish Question’ and the purpose of the letter they wrote.

Prof. Jean-Pierre Sauvage stated that he did not have much to add to the issues highlighted in the letter under his signature, “Mr Abdullah Öcalan has already been severely punished, and it is time to free him,” he said.

“The release of Mr Öcalan will also be good for the relations between the Kurdish community and the Turkish government,’ said the French chemist, who also drew attention to the role of Abdullah Öcalan in the solution of the Kurdish question.

Jean-Pierre Sauvage

Born on 21 October 1944 in Paris, Prof. Jean-Pierre Sauvage is a chemist specialised in coordination chemistry. He graduated from the National Higher School of Chemistry in Strasbourg in 1967 and received his PhD from Louis-Pasteur University in Strasbourg. He did his post-doctorate at Oxfort University and conducted research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) between 1971-2014 and started working as a professor at Strasbourg University in 2016. Prof. Sauvage, who has conducted many important studies in the field of chemistry, was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on molecular machines together with Scottish chemist J. Fraser Stoddart and Dutch chemist Bernard Feringa.