Mehmet Öcalan, the brother of Kurdish People's Leader Abdullah Öcalan and his guardian, Mazlum Dinç, applied to the Bursa Chief Public Prosecutor's Office and İmralı Prison Directorate to request a visit. Abdullah Öcalan is kept under severe isolation conditions in Imralı F Type High Security Prison and has not been heard from for over 3 years.

Ali Konar, brother of Ömer Hayri Konar, Polat Yıldırım, brother of Hamili Yıldırım, and Melihe Çetin, sister of Veysi Aktaş, the other prisoners held in Imralı, also applied to the Bursa Chief Public Prosecutor's Office and İmralı Prison Directorate.

The right to meet with the families of Abdullah Öcalan and the other three people held in Imralı is being denied by the authorities, citing "disciplinary penalties". The reasons and file numbers of these disciplinary penalties are not shared with their lawyers despite all applications and objections.

The families of the four prisoners applied for an urgent visit on 4 December, after a seaquake of magnitude of 5.1, centred around four kilometres from the coast of the port town of Mudanya at a depth of just under nine kilometres. Mudanya is located on the southern shore of the Sea of Marmara in the Gulf of Gemlik. All boats travelling to Imrali depart from there. "The fact that the island prison is located in the earthquake zone raises concerns about the health situation of the families of the prisoners detained on Imrali and requires a review of their situation," the application states. In addition to the family members, lawyer Mazlum Dinç, who is also Öcalan's authorised representative, is also demanding immediate access to the island. The authorities have not responded.

Abdullah Öcalan has been in solitary confinement on the prison island of Imrali since his abduction to Turkey in 1999. The last contact with him was a telephone conversation with his brother in spring 2021, which was interrupted after a few minutes. Öcalan last had contact with his lawyers from the Istanbul-baed Asrın Law Office in August 2019. After an eight-year interruption, a hunger strike led by politician Leyla Güven, who has since been imprisoned again, resulted in a total of five visits by lawyers. The last family visit to the island was approved in March 2020. Since then, isolation in the high-security prison has been driven to the level of total incommunicado detention.

Öcalan's three fellow prisoners Ömer Hayri Konar, Hamili Yıldırım and Veysi Aktaş, who were transferred to the island prison in 2015 as part of the dialog between the Kurdish leader and the government in Ankara, are also affected by the isolation on Imrali. The Turkish judiciary generally uses arbitrarily imposed "disciplinary measures" against the Imrali prisoners as a legal cover for the injustice on the island. The last of these "punitive measures" was imposed in October. The "Roadmap for Negotiations" written by Abdullah Öcalan in 2009, which was submitted to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) as a defense brief, is also repeatedly used as an excuse to prevent visits.