Kurdish poet İlhan Sami Çomak is one of Turkey’s longest serving political prisoners, having been imprisoned for over 26 years. His life sentence on charges of starting a forest fire and associating with the banned Kurdish Workers’ Party is due to expire in 2024, but Çomak has committed no crimes and must be freed.

Arrested in 1994 at the age of 22, Çomak was a Geography student at the University of Istanbul. He was tried and sentenced by the State Security Court, a military court which frequently heard cases involving Kurds accused of threatening state security in the 1990s and handed down harsh sentences. Although Çomak maintained his innocence for much of the trial, a confession was eventually obtained under torture.

Çomak’s initial sentence was capital punishment, but was amended in 2000 to a life sentence. Successive appeals have been denied, and the life sentence was re-confirmed in both 2013 and 2016.

Early in his prison sentence, Çomak began writing poetry about nature, his memories of the outside world, and Kurdish folk traditions. Today, he is the published author of 8 books of poetry, including the most recent Geldim Sana (I Came to You), which won the prestigious 2019 Sennur Sezer poetry prize.

Having spent more than half his life imprisoned on fabricated charges, Çomak maintains his innocence. The European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2006 that Çomak’s conviction was unlawful, and he believes that he has at no point been given the chance of a fair, impartial trial.

An international group of writers published an open letter to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson in February 2020, calling on him and Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab to demand Çomak’s freedom as a condition of future UK-Turkey trade agreements, to no avail.

Please join writers and activists around the world, as well as The Voice Project, in calling on Turkey to immediately release İlhan Sami Çomak.