Alparslan Kuytul, the head of the Furkan Foundation, has been held on remand since 23 August at the Dumlu No. 1 High Security Closed Prison outside Erzurum. His family lives in Adana. The road between the two is about 845 kilometres. His lawyer, Ömer Hakseven, puts the journey at fourteen to fifteen hours.

Kuytul has five children. Four are at school. The prison’s visiting day is Thursday, so each visit costs the children two days of schooling. He applied to have the visit moved to the weekend and submitted their student certificates with the request.

The prison’s Administration and Observation Board refused on 29 September. The Erzurum 1st Execution Judgeship rejected his complaint on 5 October. His lawyer objected the next day.

On 15 October the Erzurum 1st Assize Court allowed the objection. Its reasoning is on the record. It held that it was clear the children could not see their father without disrupting their education; that the prison’s decision contained no concrete detail on staff numbers or duties; and that refusing to arrange the visit for the weekend, without explaining how that would endanger the institution, its security or its functioning, “carries the meaning of a violation of the right to respect for family life”. It lifted the judgeship’s decision, annulled the board’s decision, and recorded that the ruling was final under Article 271 of the Code of Criminal Procedure.

The next day the Execution Judgeship issued a certificate of finality confirming that the decision had become final on 15 October. The prison told the family the visit would take place on Saturday at nine in the morning.

On 19 October the Erzurum Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office lodged an objection. It objected to the Execution Judgeship’s decision of 5 October — the decision that had rejected Kuytul’s complaint, and for which the same office had earlier submitted a written opinion asking that the defence objection be dismissed.

On 21 October, two days later, the same assize court set aside its own ruling of six days earlier. It described the decision it had itself certified as final as one “without procedurally proper finality” — a formula that appears in no provision of the Code — and did not explain what had been procedurally improper about it. It then rejected the defence objection and upheld the refusal.

The grounds it gave were that visiting days cannot be arranged for a single detainee’s request, that other detainees might ask for the same, that this could shake the institution’s order and functioning, that weekend visits would increase the workload, that a security gap might arise, and that the institution is high-security with a particular physical structure and staff complement.

Those are the same matters the court had held six days earlier the prison had failed to substantiate. Nothing in the second decision records any new evidence. The file is the same, the court is the same, and the conclusion is reversed.

Kuytul learned of it in a particular way. According to his lawyer, he had just told his wife and children on the telephone that the court had ruled in their favour and that they could come at the weekend. The notification of the reversal was served on him immediately afterwards.

Two features of the sequence are worth stating plainly for anyone reading this outside Türkiye.

The first is the asymmetry. The defence’s objection took nine days to decide. The prosecution’s took two.

The second is finality. Article 271(4) of the Code of Criminal Procedure provides that decisions given by the authority ruling on an objection are final, with one exception that does not apply here. The 15 October ruling was expressly made final, and a separate judicial document certified that it was. Turkish law provides a route for disturbing such a decision — an application for reversal in the interest of the law, under Article 309 — and it was not used. The court simply decided again.

Kuytul was remanded in August on charges of leading a criminal organisation, money laundering, aggravated fraud and forgery, days after he had publicly criticised the state’s operation against another religious community. Trustees were appointed over five companies. He was detained once before, in 2018, held for nearly two years before trial, and acquitted of all charges in 2020.

Whatever becomes of the charges, none of them is what is being decided here. What was decided here was whether four schoolchildren travel 845 kilometres on a Thursday or a Saturday. A court answered that question, in their favour, in writing, finally. Six days later it answered it again.