Murat Arslan was released on Sunday. He had been in prison since 19 October 2016, a total of 3,651 days.

He was not released early. He served the sentence to its end.

Arslan was a judge at Türkiye’s Court of Accounts and, from March 2011, the elected president of YARSAV, the country’s association of judges and prosecutors and a member of the European association MEDEL. He was dismissed from the Court of Accounts in July 2016. YARSAV was closed by the first emergency decree issued after the coup attempt, published in the Official Gazette on 23 July 2016. He was detained three months later.

In January 2019 the Ankara 25th Assize Court convicted him of membership of an armed terrorist organisation and sentenced him to ten years. The Court of Cassation upheld the conviction. According to the reporting of his trial, the case rested on an anonymous denunciation and on the presence of the ByLock application on his telephone. No act of violence and no call to violence was alleged against him.

On 9 October 2017, while he was in his second year in prison, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe awarded him the Václav Havel Human Rights Prize for his work in defence of judicial independence. He could not attend. Simone Gaboriau, a former French judge, accepted the prize on his behalf and read out his acceptance speech in Strasbourg.

Diego García-Sayán, then the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers, said after the verdict that the trial had not been fair and that the conviction was a severe attack on judicial independence in Türkiye.

He was one of many. Following the coup attempt, 4,006 judges and prosecutors were removed from office by the Council of Judges and Prosecutors. Across the public service, 113,290 people were dismissed by emergency decree between July 2016 and July 2018, and at least 134,000 in total.

Strasbourg has since ruled on this group repeatedly. In Alparslan Altan v. Turkey the Court found a violation of Article 5 § 1 in the detention of a Constitutional Court judge, and in Baş v. Turkey it reached the same conclusion for a judge detained in the same period, holding in each case that the detention had no basis in law. In Turan and Others v. Turkey it decided 427 applications together, almost all of them brought by judges and prosecutors, and found a violation of Article 5 § 1 in every one.

The evidence used against Arslan has been ruled on too. In Yüksel Yalçınkaya v. Türkiye in September 2023 the Grand Chamber held that Turkish courts had treated ByLock use as conclusive proof of every element of the offence, in breach of Articles 7 and 6 § 1, and that the problem was systemic. In Yasak v. Türkiye in May 2026 it held that listing items of evidence cannot substitute for establishing criminal intent. Counting the follow-up judgments of December 2025, June 2026 and September 2026, some 4,501 applicants have now had violations found in that line of cases.

All of that happened while Murat Arslan was in prison, and none of it shortened his sentence by a day.

Nothing in the public record explains why he served the full term rather than being considered for conditional release at the point the execution regime ordinarily allows. That question is worth asking.

He was given the Council of Europe’s human rights prize for defending the independence of the judiciary. He then served ten years, handed down by that judiciary, on evidence the European Court has since held cannot sustain such a conviction. He is out because the sentence ran out.