The Administration and Observation Board of Marmara Prison in Silivri met on 11 September 2026 to conduct the good conduct assessment governing the conditional release of the lawyer Behiç Aşcı.

The board recorded that Aşcı, sentenced to twelve years for membership of an armed terrorist organisation, had met the threshold of 40 points required for conditional release, with a score of 44.06. It recorded that repeat-offender provisions did not apply to him, that his conditional release date had arrived, and that there was no pending detention order and no disciplinary penalty.

It then found that he was not of good conduct.

Its stated reasons were that he had not committed any disciplinary infraction, and that this was observed to stem from the approach of his conditional release date. The board added that although he had been observed over approximately one year to comply more closely with the rules laid down for the order and security of penal institutions, it was assessed that he engaged in this conduct in order to obtain organisational gains. It concluded that the risk of his reoffending and of harming others was not low.

Aşcı remains in prison.

Selçuk Kozağaçlı, honorary president of the Progressive Lawyers’ Association and a co-defendant in the same case, has also been refused conditional release for want of good conduct. The board said of him that he was not in a position to integrate with society.

Aşcı is a lawyer with the People’s Law Office. On 12 September 2017, prosecutors ordered raids on the office and on lawyers’ homes, and seventeen lawyers were detained, among them Ebru Timtik, Aytaç Ünsal and Kozağaçlı. They were accused of membership of an armed terrorist organisation on the allegation that they operated within the lawyers’ structure of the DHKP-C. Aşcı was remanded on 20 September 2017.

The professional work cited against them in the file included representing the dismissed educators Nuriye Gülmen and Semih Özakça, acting as defence counsel in the cases of Berkin Elvan, Dilek Doğan and Hasan Ferit Gedik, and forming legal delegations on events in Sur, Cizre, Silvan, Reyhanlı, Soma and Ermenek.

On 14 September 2018, during the trial, the İstanbul 37th High Criminal Court ordered the detained lawyers released. According to Aşcı, the decision was communicated to him at around 23:00 and the prosecutor’s objection was lodged around 01:00, some two hours later. The presiding judge was then replaced. Akın Gürlek, at the time president of the İstanbul 26th High Criminal Court and now Justice Minister, was assigned to preside over the 37th. Aşcı was detained again outside the İstanbul Bar Association on 15 September 2018 and remanded on 16 September. He has said that no new evidence entered the file between his release and his re-arrest.

The second detention order cited witness and secret witness statements, digital material, records relating to that material and open-source research as indicators of strong suspicion, together with the nature of the offence, the anticipated sentence and an assessment that judicial control measures would be insufficient.

The court convicted Aşcı on 20 March 2019 and sentenced him to twelve years. The 16th Criminal Chamber of the Court of Cassation upheld the sentence in 2020.

Ebru Timtik, detained in the same operation, died in August 2020 after a hunger strike demanding a fair trial.

Administration and Observation Boards were established in Turkish prisons in January 2021. Opposition parties and human rights organisations have said the boards arbitrarily reject or delay conditional release and probation for political prisoners on grounds such as failure to show remorse, that they exceed their authority and act as though they were courts, and that the refusals are politically motivated.

A prisoner who breaks the rules can be refused release for his record. A prisoner who keeps them can be refused release for the reason he kept them.