- +1 (646) 480-2377
- [email protected]
- Advocates of Silenced TURKEY 271 US 46, #F 203 Fairfield, NJ, 07004
Within hours of the July 15, 2016 events — which Advocates of Silenced Turkey and independent observers regard as widely seen to have been orchestrated by the Erdoğan regime — the state did not simply investigate an insurrection. It launched a nationwide purge from lists prepared in advance.
Turkey's government has never plausibly explained how, in the chaos of a single night, it produced ready-made lists of tens of thousands of names to be erased from public life. By 01:00 on July 16 — barely three hours after the insurrection began — 2,745 judges and prosecutors had already been dismissed.4 Lists of that scale are not compiled between midnight and dawn. They were prepared in advance.
President Erdoğan himself called the night "a blessing from God," describing it as the opportunity to carry out a purge he had long wanted but, until then, could not lawfully justify.4 Whatever unfolded on July 15, its aftermath was used as a pretext for the complete conversion of a country's administrative system — and for the victimization of hundreds of thousands.
What followed was not justice under the rule of law. It was governance by Kanun Hükmünde Kararname (KHK) — emergency decrees issued with the force of law and no judicial review. People were dismissed by name in decree annexes. No hearings were held. No defense was allowed. Dismissal simultaneously meant a cancelled passport, a blacklisted profession, and a family cut off from the society around it.5
AST documents a pattern its victims describe as civil, or social, death: a person remains alive, yet their social, professional and economic existence is systematically extinguished. Fired by decree, barred from their profession, stripped of a passport, denied welfare, and marked in a shared database, the dismissed become non-persons in their own country.
AST's research catalogues this as a deliberate architecture of exclusion — its report "143 Social Genocide Practices in Erdoğan's Turkey" and its record of 153 documented categories of rights violations map how the machinery reaches from cradle to grave: infants raised in prison alongside their mothers, and the elderly and terminally ill denied the deferral of their sentences.6
International bodies independently documented the scale. The United Nations found roughly 152,000 civil servants dismissed and about 160,000 people arrested during the 18-month state of emergency.7
Scholars removed from universities and banned from public service.8
Removed from the bench — over a fifth of Turkey's judiciary — with thousands detained.9
The highest number in any single country at the time, per CPJ — with scores of outlets shut.10
Part of 100,000+ public-sector workers banned for life, per Amnesty International.11
Alongside 1,561 NGOs, 149 media outlets and 47 health institutions seized by decree.2
A decade of digital censorship; 432 ECHR judgments have found Turkey guilty of free-expression violations.12
The European Court of Human Rights, whose judgments bind Turkey as a Council of Europe member, has found the post-2016 machinery unlawful at its core.
Convicting people for using the ByLock app violated the guarantee of no punishment without law (Art. 7) and fair-trial rights. The Court called the problem "systemic," with 8,000+ similar cases pending.13
The Court found the detention pursued an ulterior political purpose (Art. 18) and later ruled Turkey breached its obligations by refusing to release him.14
The prolonged detention of an opposition leader violated free expression, the right to free elections, and — again — pursued a political purpose. Immediate release was ordered.15
The state of emergency was formally lifted in 2018 — but its measures were folded into ordinary law, and its victims were left in permanent limbo. The State of Emergency Inquiry Commission, created to review dismissals, has rejected more than 85% of the appeals it has decided, leaving applicants waiting an average of seven years for an answer that rarely comes.1
Nearly a decade later, the dismissed still cannot work in their professions. Their children still carry the mark. And the courts of Europe are still filling with cases Turkey has refused to resolve. July 15 is not history. For hundreds of thousands of people, it is a sentence still being served.
Read the record. Report a violation. Stand with the victims of Turkey's decade-long purge.
Figures reflect Advocates of Silenced Turkey's published documentation and reports from the United Nations, the European Court of Human Rights, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the Committee to Protect Journalists. Where scope or methodology differs between sources, the more conservative documented figure is used.