The verdict by the Ankara court brings to an end a 13-year legal saga which saw the defendants, among them award-winning human rights activist Leyla Zana, being tried and convicted three times on charges of collaborating in a bloody Kurdish insurgency in the country's southeast.

"The court stood by its original 1994 guilty verdict, but sentenced the former lawmakers to seven-and-half years under the new penal code" which came into effect in 2005, Zana's lawyer Yusuf Alatas said in televised remarks.

Since the defendants -- Zana, Hatip Dicle, Selim Sadak and Orhan Dogan -- have already spend 10 years in jail, they will not have to go back behind bars, Alatas said.

The lawyer also explained that Friday's verdict also lifted a political ban imposed on Zana and her colleagues, thus paving the way for their active return to politics.

The four were first sentenced to 15 years in jail in 1994 for membership of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) which has been fighting a 22-year bloody campaign for Kurdish self-rule in the country's southeast.

In March 2003, Zana -- the 1995 winner of the European Parliament's prestigious Sakharov human rights prize -- and her co-defendants were allowed a retrial after their original trial was condemned as unfair by the European Court of Human Rights in 2001.

The retrial upheld the original sentences amid accusations by rights activists and defence lawyers that the proceedings were again flawed.

However, the appeals court overturned their convictions and ordered a new trial in July 2004 a month after the four activists were released from jail.

The third retrial had began in October 2004.