ECHR Grand Chamber Orders Türkiye to Release Osman Kavala, Declares His Conviction Void

The Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights on Tuesday ordered Türkiye to release Turkish civil-society figure Osman Kavala “immediately” and said his criminal conviction must be treated as null and void under the European Convention on Human Rights, the court’s strongest intervention yet in a case in which Ankara had already ignored an earlier release order.

In its judgment in Kavala v. Türkiye (no. 2), delivered Aug. 25, the Strasbourg-based court said Türkiye must free Kavala “at the earliest possible date” and “eliminate the consequences” of his conviction. Kavala has been detained since October 2017. He was convicted on April 25, 2022, by Istanbul’s 13th Assize Court in the Gezi case and sentenced to aggravated life imprisonment, a conviction upheld by Türkiye’s Court of Cassation on Sept. 28, 2023. The court awarded him 70,000 euros, or about $75,000, for non-pecuniary damage and 43,342.57 euros in legal costs.

The significance of Tuesday’s ruling lies in where it comes in the legal sequence. The European court first ruled on Dec. 10, 2019, that Kavala should be released immediately. On July 11, 2022, the same court’s Grand Chamber found that Türkiye had failed to comply with that judgment under the Convention’s infringement procedure. The new ruling goes further still: It addresses Kavala’s detention and criminal proceedings after the 2019 judgment and says the later conviction itself must be regarded as having no legal effect under Convention law. Multiple reports summarizing the judgment said the decision was 15-2.

The European Court of Human Rights is the top human rights court of the Council of Europe, the continent-wide rights body separate from the European Union. Its judgments are binding on member states under the Convention, and their implementation is supervised by the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe. But the court cannot physically free a prisoner on its own, so any release or other remedy still requires action by Turkish authorities. Early coverage reviewed Tuesday did not show a prominent immediate formal response from Turkish authorities.

In a press summary, the court said: “The European Court of Human Rights holds that Türkiye must release Mr Kavala immediately and eliminate the consequences of his conviction.” Amnesty International said the court found that Kavala’s continued detention was unlawful and that his rights to a fair trial, freedom of expression and freedom of association had been violated. Eve Geddie, director of Amnesty International’s European Institutions Office, said, “Today, the ECHR has comprehensively established that Osman Kavala‘s detention for almost nine years is based on a politically motivated trial.”

Kavala’s case has become one of the clearest tests of Türkiye’s compliance with the European human-rights system, less because of the underlying criminal file than because of the repeated clash between domestic proceedings and Strasbourg rulings. The court’s latest judgment is notable not just for again ordering his release, but for directly targeting the legal status of the conviction entered after the first release order had already been ignored.

Aisling Reidy, a senior legal adviser at Human Rights Watch, said as reported by Amnesty International: “The European Court has now demanded his immediate release three times. It is vital that the Council of Europe and its member states act to ensure that the Court’s judgments are respected and that Osman Kavala – finally – is freed.”

Tuesday’s judgment is the third major European Court of Human Rights ruling in the Kavala case sequence: the 2019 release order, the 2022 finding that Türkiye had not complied with it, and now the 2026 ruling ordering release again while declaring that the conviction and its consequences must be erased under the Convention.