Tayfun Kahraman, and the Law That Everyone Needs

Four and a Half Years in a Cell Despite Two Constitutional Court Rulings: The Court That Said "I Don't Like It" to the Constitution, and the Arbitrariness That Awaits Us All

October 7, 2026 at 12:32 PMAuthor: Oğuz Demirkapı

The Prisoner Listed as a Fugitive: Tayfun Kahraman, and the Law That Everyone Needs

Summary of the Situation

The city planner Tayfun Kahraman has been held in Silivri since 25 April 2022, that is for four and a half years, on the 18-year prison sentence given in the Gezi case on the charge of "aiding an attempt to overthrow the government". He has had MS for years.

The summary of the last two years is this:

31 July 2025: The Constitutional Court (AYM) ruled that Kahraman's right to a fair trial had been violated, and that he be retried (by 9 votes to 5).
6 November 2025: Istanbul's 13th Heavy Penal Court refused to carry out the ruling; its ground was that the Constitutional Court had committed a "usurpation of authority". The demands for release, for a stay of the sentence, and for a retrial were turned down; the appeal was rejected too.
November 2025: In the indictment directed at the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (İBB), Kahraman, who had been in prison for years, was listed as a "fugitive".
January–February 2026: He suffered severe MS attacks in prison and was taken to Cerrahpaşa twice; during the count he fell and split his head, and the bones of his hand cracked.
2 April 2026: The Plenary of the Constitutional Court gave a second violation ruling, this time unanimously: both the right to a fair trial and the right of individual application had been breached.
6 October 2026: This ruling was published in the Official Gazette a full six months after it was given. The Constitutional Court ordered the 13th Heavy Penal Court to start the retrial "without waiting for an application from the parties", awarded 100,000 lira in non-pecuniary damages, and notified the ruling to the Ministry of Justice and to the Council of Judges and Prosecutors.

Today the ball is back in the same court. And Tayfun Kahraman is still inside.

The thesis of this piece is simple: We are not defending Ekrem İmamoğlu; our criticisms of the class character of the İBB administration and of CHP municipalism stand where they stood. But everyone needs the law. The door that closes today in front of a city planner will close tomorrow in front of a trade unionist, a striker, a journalist. Kahraman's story is for this reason not his alone; it is the story of all of us, in an order in which the constitutional guarantee has in practice been suspended.

Below we first tell who Kahraman is, then the instances of lawlessness one by one, and then what he has lived through inside.

Who Is Tayfun Kahraman?

Tayfun Kahraman is a city planner. He sat on the board of the Chamber of City Planners of TMMOB; during Gezi he was inside Taksim Solidarity, and he spoke in the chamber's name against the opening of the city's public space to the build-and-sell trade. So his "crime" was to use his profession's knowledge, in the name of the public interest, against the plunder of the city.

In 2019 he began work in the earthquake risk management and urban improvement unit of the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality. In this country an earthquake is a class question as much as it is a natural event: who sits in which building, whose building is inspected, who is displaced under the name of "urban transformation" are class questions. Kahraman went on working on the earthquake in prison too; in 2023 he was telling Medyascope that "the Istanbul earthquake is a question of survival".

Kahraman was convicted on 25 April 2022 together with Osman Kavala, Mücella Yapıcı, Çiğdem Mater, Mine Özerden, Can Atalay and Hakan Altınay. Kavala received an aggravated life sentence; the others received 18 years each. In 2023 the Court of Cassation upheld the sentences of Kahraman, Kavala and Atalay. These three names have, from that day to this, been the most concrete examples in Turkey of how selectively the notion of a "court ruling" works.

The Lawlessness, One by One

1. No concrete act, no causation

The Constitutional Court's first ruling, in 2025, was questioning the substance of the conviction. According to what Medyascope reported, the Court found that the mere fact that acts of violence had taken place in the Gezi events was not enough on its own, that a concrete link had to be established between Kahraman's acts and the violence, and that this had not been done.

Let us say this in plain language: a person was sentenced to 18 years on the ground of acts he himself did not commit, and that were not proved to be connected to him. In the words of his wife, Meriç Demir Kahraman, Tayfun is a person who "never picked up a pebble and threw it at anyone".

2. Evidence the defence did not see

The second limb of the first ruling was even more striking. At the appeal stage the judgment had been based on wiretap recordings that had never been in the first-instance file. Kahraman had had no possibility of defending himself against these recordings. The Constitutional Court counted this a violation of the principles of "equality of arms" and of "adversarial proceedings".

It is the oldest rule of criminal law: evidence used against the accused is shown to the accused. A person convicted with evidence that was not shown has not been tried; a sentence has been imposed on them.

3. The local court's "revolt" against the Constitutional Court

Article 153 of the Constitution is plain: Constitutional Court rulings bind the legislative, executive and judicial organs, the administrative authorities, and real and legal persons. There is no exception.

Despite this, on 6 November 2025 Istanbul's 13th Heavy Penal Court claimed that the Constitutional Court had committed a "usurpation of authority", and did not carry out the ruling. The same court was saying, in the reasoning reported by Haber7, "the Constitutional Court is not a super-appeal court". According to what the defence reported, a technical excuse was found as well: the retrial the Constitutional Court asked for was supposedly not the same thing as the retrial in the Code of Criminal Procedure.

Here we have to stop and concede one thing: this is not an exception, it is a method. The same method was applied in the Can Atalay file too; an elected deputy could not return to Parliament despite two separate violation rulings of the Constitutional Court, and in the end his deputyship was stripped. As we also stressed in our piece on the Constitution, the de facto situation in Turkey today is this: local courts, in the cases they do not like, can place themselves above the Constitution. And there is no sanction for it.

Lawyer Cansu Çifçi sums the situation up like this: "I, as the Constitutional Court, gave a ruling… You cannot say 'I did not like this ruling of yours.'"

4. The ruling held for six months

The second violation ruling was given on 2 April 2026. But it was published in the Official Gazette only on 6 October 2026. Medyascope, at the beginning of September, had drawn attention to the ruling having gone unpublished for five months. The warning of lawyer İsmail Emre Telci was well placed: a ruling that is not published is not carried out; the delay also renders the domestic remedies ineffective.

Who paid the price of this delay? A sick person, six more months in a cell. The law has to be judged not only by the rulings it gives, but also by when it gives those rulings and when it publishes them. Delayed justice is not justice; all the more so when the subject of that justice is a prisoner with MS.

5. The "fugitive" in the cell

A detail brought out by sol.org.tr on 28 November 2025 showed how carelessly and arbitrarily this whole picture had been constructed: on the list of suspects in the indictment directed at the İBB, Tayfun Kahraman appeared as a "fugitive". A person whose presence is established every day, in the state's own prison, at the count of the state's own guards, had been declared "on the run" by the same state's prosecution.

This detail may look ridiculous, but it is not ridiculous. It shows this: Kahraman's name had been added to the list, even though it had never come up before in the İBB investigation, because he was "an opponent who had worked at the İBB". This is the most naked form of a legal understanding that accuses a person not for their act, but for the place they were, the people they knew, and the institution they worked for. The Constitutional Court's finding in the Gezi case that "there is no concrete act", and this "fugitive" entry in the İBB indictment, are two faces of the same mentality: first the person is chosen, then a crime is looked for.

6. "You have no authority to resist our rulings"

The reasoning of the Constitutional Court, published on 6 October, carries a severity rarely seen in Turkey's judicial history. According to the reasoning reported by Anka:

Judicial authorities have no power to question the bindingness of Constitutional Court rulings, or to avoid carrying them out.
In a democratic state under the rule of law, judicial organs cannot disregard the Constitutional Court's rulings by accusing it of "exceeding its authority".
The limit of the Constitutional Court's authority is set not by the local courts, but only by the Constitution.
Allowing resistance to its rulings "drags the legal system inevitably into chaos."
The 13th Heavy Penal Court is obliged to start the retrial without waiting for an application from the parties, on the papers or by opening a hearing.

A striking note: even Feti Yıldız, Deputy Chair of the MHP, said the ruling had no side that was open to debate. This voice, coming from inside the ruling bloc, shows that the matter is now, beyond the "left–right" distinction, a matter of the legal order's minimum consistency.

7. The same week, the same case, the same court

In the week the Constitutional Court ruling was published, there is a development at the other end of the Gezi case too: on 25 August 2026 the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) gave a new violation ruling concerning six separate fundamental rights in Osman Kavala's case; the Ministry of Justice completed the 160-page Turkish translation of the ruling. According to what Bold Medya reported, the Court finds that the investigating authorities could not show that Kavala had concretely taken part in acts of violence.

So in the same case both the highest court of the domestic law and the international court to which Turkey is a party are saying the same thing: there is no concrete act. And the addressee of both rulings is the same local court: Istanbul's 13th Heavy Penal Court.

What Happened Inside

A legal debate can look abstract. A cell is not abstract.

Four and a half years, one hour from behind glass. When Meriç Demir Kahraman told, in January 2026, of her 196th visit to Silivri, she was saying that the visits were held from behind glass, limited to one hour.

An MRI given for three months later. Kahraman, taken to hospital in June 2025, was given an appointment three months later for the MRI scan, which is vital for monitoring MS. According to what his wife reported, in his previous attacks he had become unable to walk, to speak, to write. Despite the supplements, his vitamin D levels were not rising to the level the doctors wanted, because of conditions in which he sees no sun.

January 2026: a new attack. On 2 January he was taken to Cerrahpaşa with an acute MS attack. His lawyer was plain: "If the Constitutional Court ruling had been carried out, his health would not have come to this point." Cortisone treatment and about ten days of hospital care were required; he was then sent back to prison.

The man who fell at the count. After he returned to prison he fell during the count. In Meriç Demir Kahraman's telling: "We could not even touch the scabbed split wounds on his forehead, or his hand whose bones had cracked." In MS, loss of balance is a known symptom; a regime of standing headcounts is a risk in itself for a sick person.

11 February 2026: hospital again. He was referred to Cerrahpaşa once more with an acute attack. His wife's call was the same again: let the Constitutional Court ruling be carried out, let Tayfun be released.

One sentence of Meriç Demir Kahraman's sums this section up: "For us, justice is now a matter of the right to life."

It is not possible here to separate the human from the political. A sick prisoner's access to treatment, their contact with their family, the conditions of the cell: all of these are areas of discretion in the state's hands. How these areas are used shows how the state looks at that person. The look at Kahraman is plain: the health of a person whom the Constitutional Court has twice said is "inside unjustly" is being spent as the price of rulings that are not carried out.

We Are Not Defending İmamoğlu; We Are Defending the Law

At this point we have to speak plainly, because we are not hiding where the piece looks from.

We are not defending Ekrem İmamoğlu's politics. We have criticisms of the İBB administration's relation with capital, of its tender regime, of its practice of urban transformation, of its relation with municipal workers, and we will go on voicing them. The CHP's discourse of "merit" and "good governance" promises that the capitalist state will be managed more properly; it does not question the order itself. From our point of view this form of opposition is not a solution.

But not defending İmamoğlu does not require staying silent in the face of lawlessness. On the contrary: those who do class politics are the ones who need legal guarantees the most. Why?

First, the law is not above classes, but the guarantees have been won by struggle. The Marxist tradition says that the law is the instrument of the ruling class; that is true. But principles such as the "presumption of innocence", "showing the evidence to the accused", "the personal nature of criminal responsibility", and "the bindingness of Constitutional Court rulings" did not come down from the sky. They were obtained by the struggles waged against absolute monarchies, against arbitrary detention, and against the closure of workers' organisations. To lose these positions is to lose the possibility of organising and of opposition.

Second, what is applied today to the opposition municipal politician is applied tomorrow to the trade unionist. If the logic of "guilty because of where they were", "a suspect because of whom they knew", "no concrete act is required" settles once, the place where it will be applied most easily is the organised worker. In an order that postpones strikes on the ground of "national security" and investigates workers' actions under the heading of "terror", local courts being able to shelve Constitutional Court rulings means that the last legal footholds in the working class's hands fall empty too.

Third, arbitrariness is not a political preference; it is a form of rule. An order in which it is uncertain whether rulings will be carried out, whether they will be published, and who will be counted a "fugitive", keeps everyone on alert. Uncertainty produces fear; fear, obedience. This is an inseparable part of the form that the continuity of capital accumulation and of power takes in Turkey today.

Fourth, Gezi was a struggle for the right to the city. The substance of the events for which Kahraman was tried was opposition to the opening of a public space to capital. The question of whose the city is, is the class question itself. A judicial understanding that counts Gezi as a "coup attempt" is an understanding that counts the defence of public property as a crime. For this reason the Tayfun Kahraman case is not a distant file for those who wage the struggle of labour and of the city.

In short: while we keep our difference with İmamoğlu, to defend the legal guarantee of Tayfun Kahraman, of Osman Kavala, of Can Atalay, and of the hundreds of prisoners whose names we do not know, is to defend our own future.

A Comparison: What Does the Constitution Say, What Does the Practice Do?

Principle of the Constitution and of the law	The practice in the Tayfun Kahraman file
Constitutional Court rulings bind everyone (Constitution, art. 153)	The local court did not carry out the ruling, saying "usurpation of authority"
Criminal responsibility is personal; a concrete act is required	The Constitutional Court and the ECtHR: no concrete link with the violence was established
Equality of arms, adversarial proceedings	The judgment was based on wiretap recordings the defence did not see
Judgment within a reasonable time, without delay	The second violation ruling was held for six months in the Official Gazette
A sick prisoner's access to treatment	An appointment three months later for an MRI; repeated severe attacks
Accuracy of documents, a duty of care	A person in prison was written down as a "fugitive" in the indictment
The consequence of finding a violation: remedying the violation	Four and a half years later, still inside

What Should Happen Now?

The Constitutional Court's reasoning writes plainly what has to be done. Let us write the demands plainly too:

Istanbul's 13th Heavy Penal Court should carry out the Constitutional Court ruling without delay, should start the retrial, and during the retrial should release Tayfun Kahraman at once. As lawyer Cansu Çifçi said, at the stage that has been reached the imprisonment no longer has any legal purpose.
The Council of Judges and Prosecutors should do what is required, in the face of this ruling which the Constitutional Court notified to it, concerning a practice that disregards a constitutional obligation.
A statutory time limit should be set for the publication of Constitutional Court rulings in the Official Gazette; rulings that concern a prisoner's liberty should not be held for months.
For sick prisoners, an assessment system should be established that rests on the reports of independent health boards and is not in the monopoly of forensic medicine. Practices such as the standing headcount and visits from behind glass should be reviewed for prisoners with a chronic illness.
For all the convicts of the Gezi case, the ECtHR and Constitutional Court rulings should be carried out.
Professional organisations, unions and bar associations should take up this case not as "the opposition's case" but as the case of the legal guarantee. The struggle of TMMOB and of the Chamber of City Planners is the example of this; the same taking-up is expected from the workers' confederations too.

What Everyone Needs

There is an irony in Tayfun Kahraman's story: a city planner who worked to manage earthquake risk is being held right on the fault line of the legal order. This fault line runs between what the Constitution writes and what the courts do. And this line opens a little further every day.

We are not İmamoğlu's lawyers. But in a country where a court can say "I don't like it" to the Constitution, where a prisoner can be written down as a "fugitive", where a violation ruling can be kept in a drawer for six months, we know that one day everyone will need the law. If we want there still to be a law to defend when that day comes, we have to defend it today, for Tayfun Kahraman.

Freedom for Tayfun Kahraman. Let the Constitutional Court rulings be carried out.

Sources

Related pieces from Bilgi Müşterekleri:

Parliament Is Opening, but What Is It For? — the Can Atalay file, and Constitutional Court rulings that are not carried out
Whose Contract Is the Constitution? — local courts placing themselves, in practice, above the Constitution

Tags:#tayfunkahraman#law#ibb#imamoglu#justice #court#gezi#turkey