The lawyer of Kenan Ayaz, who was convicted last year of being a member of a proscribed terrorist organisation after being extradited from Cyprus to Germany, has requested that his client serve the remainder of his sentence in Cyprus.

Efstathios Efstathiou announced that he had addressed a letter to Justice Minister Marios Hartsiotis pointing out that when the Larnaca district court approved Ayaz’s extradition, this was one of the conditions it had set.

He added that this condition had been accepted by the German authorities, and that as such, “Hartsiotis … must request this”.

Additionally, he said, Antonia von der Behrens, Ayaz’s defence counsel in Germany, will apply to Germany’s justice ministry “for the issuance for a certificate justifying the implementation” of that condition.

“Now, diplomacy must ‘speak’ so that Kurdish activist Kenan Ayaz, who was recognised as a political refugee in the Republic of Cyprus and who has never stopped repeating the need for the liberation of Cyprus and Kurdistan, does not have to spend any more days in such appalling conditions of detention,” he said.

Ayaz had been sentenced to four and a half years in prison last year after having been convicted of being a member of a “foreign terrorist organisation”, namely the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK).

He had initially been jailed in Turkey in 1993, before later being acquitted. He was then indicted again in Turkey in 2010, before travelling to Cyprus, where he was granted refugee status.

German authorities then issued a European arrest warrant in his name, and he was then extradited in 2023.

The PKK is a proscribed terrorist organisation in Turkey, the European Union, the United States, and the United Kingdom, among other countries.

It had launched its insurgency in 1984 with the initial aim of creating an independent Kurdish state. In total, more than 40,000 people have been killed in the conflict, before announcing its dissolution earlier this month.

That dissolution came off the back of months of rapprochement efforts on the part of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, political party MHP leader Devlet Bahceli, and the PKK’s jailed leader Abdullah Ocalan, who had called on the group to lay down its arms in February.

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan described the group’s decision to dissolve as “historic and significant, particularly in terms of achieving lasting peace and stability in our region”.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, meanwhile, also welcomed the move, with his spokesman Stephane Dujarric saying that “this decision, if implemented, represents another important step towards the peaceful resolution of a longstanding conflict”.