It means convicts who have served half of their prison term will be eligible for parole.
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Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag said in a series of messages on Twitter that the release was “not an amnesty” and the convicts were not being pardoned but released on parole.
In a decree issued on Wednesday by the Official Gazette on the Republic of Turkey, Turkey is conditionally releasing 38,000 prisoners taken into custody following a failed coup d’état.
The measures would not apply for crimes committed after July 1, excluding any people later convicted of coup involvement.
Tens of thousands of others with suspected links to Gulen have been suspended or dismissed from their jobs in the judiciary, media, education, health care, military and local government.
The ongoing state of emergency has allowed President Erdogan to launch more drastic and authoritative measures that in the end will allow him to have a tighter control over all of Turkey’s public institutions.
Turkey said on Wednesday that it would empty its prisons of tens of thousands of criminals to make room for a new wave of detainees, including journalists, teachers, lawyers and judges rounded up in connection with last month’s failed coup.
As of January 13, Turkey had 179,611 people in its jails, which have a capacity of 183,871, according to the prisons administration.
Turkish officials have also accused the U.S. government of being behind the coup. “I wasn’t expecting anything like this”, prisoner Turgay Aydin was quoted by Andolu news agency telling reporters outside Turkey’s largest prison Silivri, west of Istanbul.
The Turkey will release 38,000 prisoners sentenced for acts that occurred before 1 st July so before the failed putsch of mid-July.
Turkey blames the cleric Fethullah Gulen, who lives in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania, for the coup in which 240 civilians and security forces, and around 100 coup participants, were killed.
In this context Turkey’s call to extradite Fetullah Gulen from the United States could not go unheeded, he added.
Measures in Wednesday’s decrees will also enable former air force pilots to return to duty, making up for a deficit resulting from the dismissal of military pilots in the wake of the putsch attempt.
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“It is absolutely imperative that the Turkish authorities halt these abhorrent practices and allow global monitors to visit all these detainees in the places they are being held”, stated Amnesty’s director in Europe John Dalhuisen.
