Justice remains elusive for Metin Kilicaslan, a wedding singer from the mainly Kurdish province of Siirt in southeast Turkey who’s been languishing in a Turkish prison since 2015 on charges of membership of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

He tracks his days spent in jail by his daughter’s birthdays. She was newly born when Kilicaslan was hauled away into the sort of legal inferno that has beset Turkey’s increasingly politicized, massively overburdened and cruelly arbitrary judicial system.

The evidence used to convict Kilicaslan, 31, includes mobile text messages in which a friend tells him, “There’s a wedding in our neighborhood.” He responds, “I know bro.” The exchange was declared a secret code used to organize a terrorist plot. Kilicaslan’s lawyer, Cihan Toprak, called the case against him a “mockery of justice.”

Kilicaslan’s troubles date back to 2013, when Kurdish youth hurled rocks at security forces across the predominantly Kurdish southeast region to protest their heavy-handed tactics and to signal support for the PKK. He was arrested along with 25 others, many of them juveniles, on charges of violently resisting police, organizing illegal demonstrations and throwing Molotov cocktails and similar devices to attack police. The charges were overturned by a regional court, but the same court upheld the charge of membership of a terrorist organization, for which he was sentenced to 7.5 years.