The Framework Law (1): Deferral for the Armed, Punishment for the Unarmed Opposition

Nasreddin Hodja, who is ignored at a banquet when he arrives in his everyday clothes, is given the seat of honour when he returns wearing his fur coat. To show that the hospitality is not meant for him, the Hodja holds his spoon out to his coat and says, “Eat, my fur coat, eat.”

The Framework Law is unfolding in exactly the same way: the same law, the same procedure, but selective justice shaped according to who the actors are. Deferral and impunity for the armed actor; punishment for the unarmed opponent.

When the law changes according to the coat on a person’s back, there is a problem of justice before there is one of national unity.

What the Framework Law Introduces

The report of the “Commission on National Solidarity, Brotherhood and Democracy” dealt with disarmament, the rule of law and democratisation; the “Bill on Strengthening National Solidarity and Social Integration” was based on Section 6 of the report, on disarmament. Although the report also covered other topics such as the rule of law and democratisation, the AKP members who drafted the bill pursued the process solely through this section, which contains the provisions concerning the PKK.

The bill was submitted to the Turkish Grand National Assembly (TBMM) on 5 August 2026 with the signatures of 367 MPs; it was adopted by the Justice Committee on 8 August and by the plenary on 10 August with 467 votes in favour, 87 against and 7 abstentions.

The arrangement is very new. So we first need to look at the 12 articles adopted by parliament.

The law sets out a special legal route only for the PKK, the KCK and affiliated groups. The system depends on two decisions. First, the security institutions must establish that the organisation has ended its actual existence and handed over its weapons. Then the National Security Council (MGK) must adopt a decision confirming this finding, which is published in the Official Gazette.

Once these conditions are met, investigations, prosecutions or the enforcement of sentences for offences carrying a maximum penalty of 15 years or less will be deferred for five years. For more serious offences and life sentences, the deferral period will be ten years. Intentional killing committed as part of the organisation’s activities and offences carrying life sentences committed before 1 June 2005 are excluded. Anyone wishing to benefit must apply in writing within six months of the MGK decision.

Article 8 regulates the procedure for receiving and recording weapons.

Deferral does not simply mean that the file is put on hold. During the period, limitation periods for prosecution and sentences do not run, files and evidence are preserved, and individual deferral decisions can be appealed. If the person commits a new terrorist offence during this period, the deferral is revoked. If the period is completed without a new terrorist offence, a “decision not to prosecute” is issued at the investigation stage or the case is “dismissed” if proceedings have begun, and the deferred sentence is deemed to have been served.

Article 7 sets up an executive-dominated Board chaired by the Vice President and composed of the relevant ministers and senior figures from the security bureaucracy. This Board, which in practice runs the process, can ask the courts to lift the deprivation of rights after certain periods, and the courts make the final decision. The parliamentary Monitoring Commission also provided for in the law is separate from this Board, and its powers are limited to monitoring and making recommendations.

Article 10 regulates the immunity of public officials: it provides that officials shall incur no civil, administrative or criminal liability for acts performed in the course of their duties.

The Government’s Claim That “It Is Not an Amnesty” Does Not Change the Outcome

MHP deputy chair Feti Yıldız and the chair of parliament’s Justice Committee, Cüneyt Yüksel of the AKP, argue that the arrangement is not an amnesty. Their argument rests on the fact that it does not create a classic general amnesty that wipes out convictions from day one: both point to the individual application requirement, the exclusion of certain serious offences and the revocation of the benefit if a new terrorist offence is committed during the deferral period.

But this technical distinction does not remove the outcome the arrangement leads to. At the end of the five- or ten-year period, the investigation is closed, the case is dismissed or the sentence is deemed served. The file is closed permanently without the sentence ever being served; at the end of the period, the state has entirely given up its claim to punish. In practice, the outcome for the individual is no different from that of an amnesty. This is the basis of the objection by New Party deputy group chair Murat Emir: “You cannot hide an amnesty by calling it a deferral of enforcement.”

What emerges is a mechanism of impunity that differs from a classic general amnesty and is tied to a specific condition of behaviour. In other words, the concept of “conditional impunity” describes the end of criminal proceedings once the five- or ten-year condition is fulfilled.

This system, called a framework law, was not established as a legal rule applying to everyone; it will cover only persons within the scope of the PKK/KCK. The debate begins here: about the generality of laws, equality before the law and the disregard of rule-of-law principles, and about for whom the government is making exceptions. Those left out are not limited to members of the Gülen movement, whose exclusion was challenged in parliament: those convicted in the Gezi trial, CHP mayors and politicians under judicial pressure, people dismissed by emergency decree (KHK) and jailed journalists will continue to face criminal pressure under the same legal order, even though they have not resorted to violence. The state that grants deferral to members of an armed organisation provides no similar relief for the unarmed opposition.

Feti Yıldız defended the arrangement as a “Turkish model”, citing the examples of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). The examples invoked by the government, rather than validating the law, make visible the safeguards missing from the text.

IRA and FARC: Guarantees and Social Transformation

Northern Ireland and Colombia are regarded as relatively strong examples in terms of the conditions for success. In these cases, neither the state nor the organisation alone decided that weapons had been laid down. Independent bodies monitored the process, and disarmament went hand in hand with broader political arrangements.

The guarantor does not have to be a foreign institution. A credible domestic body independent of the executive could also do this job. The test is simple: neither party should be able to declare its own success alone.

In Northern Ireland, disarmament was verified by the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning (IICD), and it was not enough for the state or the IRA to say “the weapons have been laid down”. While external guarantees created a common standard both sides had to meet, power-sharing was established, political representation widened and politics was opened up to broader sections of society.

In Colombia, the UN verified the FARC’s laying down of arms. The Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) offered alternative sentences to those who told the truth and accepted responsibility, while reparations were provided for victims. Rural reform was meant to involve the regions affected by the conflict and the unarmed population in the process. When the reform was not implemented, the well-prepared peace plan did not take hold on the ground.

Reparations and the pace of trials created serious problems in these models. For a useful comparison, three common elements matter here: independent verification, defined rights for the victims of terrorist offences, and political reforms that reach society as a whole.

The Framework Law makes the handover of weapons a matter of record, provides for no independent guarantor and creates no route to truth or compensation for victims. The victims here are not an abstraction: families who lost loved ones in the conflict, relatives who still do not know who killed civilians, and those forced to leave their villages. Truth means these people being able to learn from an official record what happened to their loved ones; compensation means the state recognising and making good their loss. In Colombia, the JEP made telling the truth a condition of legal relief; in the Framework Law, victims have neither an authority they can turn to nor any right written into the law. The democratisation proposals, too, remain in the Commission report rather than in the binding law. With these gaps in plain view, invoking the names of the IRA and FARC does not strengthen the Turkish arrangement. The strength of a peace model comes from its guarantees of oversight and equality.

We will return to this subject.