This article looks at what a June 2026 report from the Italian Federation for Human Rights (FIDU) documents, how “civil death” works, who it reaches, and why the numbers matter on the tenth anniversary of the events that started it.

What Does the FIDU Report Actually Say?

The report, titled “Civil Death in Practice,” was published on June 16, 2026, and timed to the tenth anniversary of the July 15, 2016 coup attempt. According to FIDU, the purge that followed the coup attempt was never a one-time act of dismissal. It became a lasting legal and social condition that continues to exclude its victims from public and economic life a decade later. (FIDU)

The central finding is a set of numbers. FIDU reports that 162,239 public servants were dismissed in the aftermath of the coup attempt, and that only 24,368 of them had been reinstated as of January 2026. On the report’s own figures, that leaves the overwhelming majority still shut out, years after the state of emergency that produced their removal formally ended.

These figures come from FIDU’s report, and it is worth stating that clearly. They are the findings of a human rights organization documenting a pattern, not independently audited government statistics. The value of the report is in how it frames what those dismissals became: not a closed chapter, but an ongoing exclusion measured in years.

What Does “Civil Death” Mean in Practice?

The phrase sounds dramatic, but the report uses it in a precise sense. The people it describes are not stripped of citizenship. On paper they remain Turkish citizens with the same nominal rights as anyone else. What FIDU documents is the gap between that formal status and the reality of daily life.

According to the report, purge victims are excluded from employment, from the financial system, from licensed professions, from state benefits, and from civic life more broadly. A dismissed teacher cannot simply move to another school. A dismissed lawyer or doctor can lose the right to practice the profession they trained for. The mark left by a dismissal follows a person into hiring decisions, banking relationships, and access to the ordinary supports the state provides its citizens.

“Civil death” is FIDU’s name for that combination. A person is alive, present, and legally a citizen, yet functionally erased from the institutions that make citizenship meaningful. The report’s argument is that this is not an accidental side effect of the purge. It is what the purge has become: statelessness experienced in place, without anyone ever formally revoking a nationality.

Why Frame the Purge as Ongoing Rather Than Past?

The tenth anniversary invites a tidy story in which the coup attempt, the state of emergency, and the mass dismissals all belong to a period that has closed. FIDU’s report is built to resist that story.

The reinstatement figure is the core of the argument. If the purge were genuinely in the past, the count of people restored to their positions would be climbing toward the count of people removed. Instead, on FIDU’s numbers, reinstatements sit far below dismissals a full decade later. The report reads that gap not as a backlog slowly clearing, but as a durable condition that the passage of time has normalized rather than resolved.

That reframing carries a demand with it. If exclusion is ongoing, then it is a present harm that can still be remedied, not a historical grievance to be acknowledged and filed away. The people described in the report are not waiting for recognition of something that happened to them. They are living inside something that is still happening.

What Have European Courts Said?

FIDU does not rest its case on its own framing alone. According to the report, its analysis is anchored to two judgments of the European Court of Human Rights.

The first is the Court’s 2023 ruling in Yalcinkaya, which the report treats as a landmark on how post-coup prosecutions and measures were built. The second is a more recent judgment, Yasak, decided by the European Court of Human Rights in May 2026, which the report cites as fresh confirmation from Strasbourg that the issues raised by the purge remain live before international judges. (FIDU)

These are rulings of the European Court of Human Rights, the body whose judgments Türkiye is bound to implement as a member of the Council of Europe. FIDU’s point in anchoring its analysis to them is that the concerns it raises are not confined to advocacy. They have reached, and continue to reach, the highest human rights court on the continent.

The Human Cost Behind the Numbers

A figure like 162,239 is difficult to feel. It has to be translated back into lives to mean anything.

Behind each dismissal in the FIDU count is a household that lost an income and, often, the professional identity built over a working lifetime. The report’s picture of “civil death” is a picture of ordinary futures foreclosed: careers that cannot be resumed, savings and credit that become hard to reach, benefits that do not arrive, and a social standing quietly rewritten by a single administrative act. The 24,368 reinstatements represent people who found a way back. The far larger remainder are still outside, a decade in.

The deepest damage is the one that does not appear in any table. When exclusion lasts this long and reaches this widely, it teaches a lesson to everyone who watches it. The cost of falling under suspicion is not a hearing or a fixed penalty with an end date. It can be a permanent removal from ordinary life, imposed without a conviction and lifted for only a fraction of those it touches.

Why This Matters Today

A decade is long enough for a wrong to be mistaken for a settled fact. The June 2026 report matters because it refuses that mistake. By leading with the gap between 162,239 dismissals and 24,368 reinstatements as of January 2026, FIDU insists that the purge is not a historical event but a present condition, and that a citizenship reduced to a document is a harm that continues every day it goes unaddressed.

Advocates of Silenced Turkey documents cases like these because the people inside them are more than a subtraction on a ledger. International attention remains one of the few forces capable of turning “civil death” back into full civic life. The European Court of Human Rights has repeatedly taken up the questions the purge raised, and FIDU has now put a decade of exclusion on the record. The work that remains is to make sure the anniversary is remembered not as a closing, but as a call to reopen what was shut.

The post Civil Death: How Türkiye’s Purge Victims Are Still Excluded a Decade On appeared first on Advocates of Silenced Turkey.

What Happened After the Coup Attempt?

The immediate response was a declared state of emergency, and the emergency became the instrument of governance. Rather than prosecute individuals through the ordinary courts, the government removed people from public life in bulk. Human Rights Watch documented that more than 100,000 civil servants were dismissed or detained without due process in the aftermath of the coup attempt. (Human Rights Watch)

That figure is a floor, not a ceiling, and it is worth being precise about why. Different counts capture different cutoff points as successive decrees were issued. Roughly 134,000 people were removed through the emergency decrees themselves, and higher tallies circulate depending on which decrees and which categories are included. Ali Özkaya, AK Party Member of Parliament for Afyonkarahisar, announced in a speech he delivered in the General Assembly of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey on January 23, 2026, that a total of 162,239 people had been dismissed from public service under the Decrees Laws (KHKs) issued following July 15. As of the counts available, the safest reading is the conservative one: at minimum, six figures of public servants lost their livelihoods, and the true reach was almost certainly larger than any single number suggests.

How Do You Fire 160,000 People Without a Trial?

The mechanism was deceptively simple, and that is precisely what makes it so serious. Public servants were dismissed by name in the annexes of emergency decrees. There was no hearing. There was no trial. There was no individualized finding that any particular person had done anything wrong. A name on a list was the beginning and the end of the process.

The dismissal did not stop at the loss of a job. It carried a lifetime ban from public service, closing off an entire sector of employment permanently. For a teacher, a nurse, or a civil engineer whose career had been built inside public institutions, the decree did not pause a livelihood. It ended one, and foreclosed the obvious path to rebuilding it.

This is what distinguishes a purge from ordinary discipline. Discipline is individual: it asks what a specific person did and gives them a chance to answer. A purge is collective: it sorts people by category, by association, by suspicion, and removes them in groups. When the unit of decision is a list rather than a case, the ordinary protections of law, notice, evidence, a hearing, an appeal, have already been bypassed by design.

Was This Legal Under International Law?

States are permitted to derogate from some human rights obligations during a genuine emergency, but that permission has limits, and it was tested here directly. A 2018 analysis published in the Oxford Human Rights Law Review examined the post-coup purge against Türkiye’s obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights and concluded that the dismissals could not be reconciled with those obligations. (Oxford Human Rights Law Review)

Be exact about what that is and what it is not. This is a scholarly, academic conclusion by legal researchers, not a ruling of the European Court of Human Rights. It carries the weight of careful legal reasoning, not the binding force of a judgment. But the argument it makes is pointed: an emergency does not suspend the requirement that punishment be individual, that people know the case against them, and that they have a route to challenge it. Measures that dispense with all of these at once, and apply them to well over a hundred thousand people, sit outside what the Convention allows even in a crisis.

The distinction between a scholarly finding and a court ruling matters for honesty, and it also matters for the argument. The problem here is not that one tribunal disagreed with one government. It is that the basic structure of the purge, collective removal without individual due process, is difficult to square with the legal commitments Türkiye has undertaken, and independent legal scholarship has said so plainly.

The Human Cost Behind the Numbers

A headcount hides more than it shows. Behind 160,000-plus dismissals are households that lost their only income, children pulled out of the routines their parents could no longer afford, and professionals branded by association with a label they were never allowed to contest in court.

The lifetime ban is where the cost compounds. A dismissal is a shock. A permanent exclusion is a sentence, served across decades, without the trial that a sentence is supposed to require. Many of those removed were not accused of any violent act. They were removed for suspected links, and once the decree was published, the burden of proving a negative fell on them, in a system that had already decided.

There is a quieter cost as well, and it reaches far beyond the named. When a signature, an affiliation, or a past workplace can end a career overnight, everyone still employed learns the lesson. The safest posture becomes silence and distance: from colleagues under suspicion, from institutions out of favor, from anything that might one day appear on a list. A purge of a hundred thousand disciplines the millions who watched it happen.

Why This Matters Today

Ten years is long enough for an emergency measure to be reclassified as normal, and that is the real risk of the anniversary. The state of emergency has ended. The dismissals have not been reversed. The bans remain in force. What began as a response to a single night in July 2016 has settled into a permanent fact of Turkish public life, and the passage of a decade makes it easier to treat that permanence as settled rather than contested.

Advocates of Silenced Turkey documents these cases because a number is not a person, and because a decade of distance should sharpen the record, not erase it. The people dismissed by name in those decree annexes are still owed what they were denied: an individual account of what they were accused of, and a real chance to answer it. The tenth anniversary is not a closing of the file. It is a reason to keep it open.

The post Ten Years of Purge: The Decade Since July 15, 2016 appeared first on Advocates of Silenced Turkey.

This article explains what Türkiye’s disinformation law actually says, why a law against “false information” became a threat to free expression, how it has been used since it passed, and what it means for journalists working in the country today.

What Is Türkiye’s Disinformation Law?

In October 2022, Türkiye’s parliament passed Law No. 7418, which amended the Press Law, the Internet Law, and the Penal Code. (Library of Congress) The piece that drew international alarm was a new crime added to the Penal Code: Article 217/A, “publicly disseminating false information.”

The provision punishes anyone who “publicly disseminates false information about the country’s domestic and foreign security, public order and general health, with the sole aim of creating anxiety, fear or panic among the public,” with one to three years in prison. The sentence increases by half if the person hides their identity or acts as part of an organization. (Venice Commission opinion)

It is popularly known as the “disinformation law” or the “censorship law.” Those are nicknames, not its title, but they capture what worried its critics from the start.

Why Is a Law Against “False Information” a Threat to Free Speech?

The problem is that nobody, including the law itself, can say with certainty what counts as “false information.”

The Council of Europe’s Venice Commission, the continent’s leading authority on constitutional law, reviewed the draft before it passed and reached an unusually blunt conclusion. It found the offense was an interference with freedom of expression under Article 10 of the European Convention. It identified terms like “false information,” “publicly disseminating,” and “disturbance of the public peace” as “very broad and vague, and open to different interpretations.” It noted that no definition of “false information” had been provided at all. And it warned the law would have “a chilling effect” and lead to “widespread self-censorship,” concluding there was “no pressing social need” for it. Its recommendation was direct: do not enact it. (Venice Commission)

The OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media echoed the concern, warning that the “vague definitions and broad scope” could “lead to arbitrary and politically motivated actions at the expense of free speech.” (OSCE) Türkiye passed the law anyway.

How Has the Law Been Used So Far?

The fear was that a vague law would become a tool against journalists. The record since 2022 bears that out.

According to figures shared in parliament and reported by the Media and Law Studies Association, in the law’s first two years authorities opened 4,188 investigations, examined 4,590 people, and made 33 arrests under Article 217/A. At least 56 journalists were investigated and seven were arrested. (MLSA)

The cases are concrete. Columnist Tolga Şardan was jailed in late 2023 over a column about an alleged intelligence report on judicial corruption, charged under the new article. (Committee to Protect Journalists) More recently, journalists Murat Ağırel and Barış Pehlivan were each sentenced to 15 months, and Zafer Arapkirli to two and a half years, for “disinformation” over critical commentary, though they remained free pending appeal. (Committee to Protect Journalists) In each case, the “false information” at issue was journalism the government did not like.

What Does This Mean for Journalists in Türkiye?

The disinformation law does not stand alone. It sits on top of an older internet law, Law No. 5651, amended in 2020 and again in 2022, which forces large social media platforms to appoint local representatives, comply with removal demands, and risk having their bandwidth throttled by up to 90 percent if they refuse. Human Rights Watch described the combined effect as pushing toward “an almost total censorship regime.” (Human Rights Watch)

The backdrop is a country already near the bottom of global press-freedom rankings: Reporters Without Borders placed Türkiye 163th out of 180 countries in its 2026 World Press Freedom Index. (RSF) For a journalist there, the disinformation law adds one more reason to hesitate before publishing, which is precisely its function.

Why the Disinformation Law Still Matters

The genius of a law like this is that it rarely needs to be used. A few high-profile prosecutions, a vague enough definition, and the rest of the work is done quietly, in the pause before a reporter hits publish and decides it is not worth the risk. That silence does not show up in any statistics. It is the law working exactly as designed.

Advocates of Silenced Turkey documents how the disinformation law is applied because the line between fighting falsehood and punishing truth depends entirely on who gets to decide what is false. When that power belongs to the state alone, “disinformation” becomes whatever the state would rather the public not hear. A free society cannot survive that, and the people most at risk for saying so deserve to be heard.

The post The Disinformation Law and Freedom of Expression in Türkiye appeared first on Advocates of Silenced Turkey.

This article explains how investigations and trials drag on for years in Türkiye, how that delay itself becomes the punishment, what it costs the people caught inside it, and what international courts have already said about it.

How Long Do Investigations and Trials Last in Türkiye?

The first thing to understand is time. Cases do not move quickly, and the slowness is not an accident of an overloaded system. It is a tool.

Human Rights Watch’s 2019 report Lawyers on Trial documented lawyers held in pre-trial detention for many months before any verdict. In one Ankara case, 52 lawyers were charged and most were held up to 16 months before being conditionally released. In another, detained lawyers waited up to a year just for their first hearing. (Human Rights Watch)

The delays reach the highest level. In the case of civil society figure Osman Kavala, the European Court of Human Rights noted that Türkiye’s own Constitutional Court took one year, four months and 24 days to review his detention complaint, far outside the “speediness” the European Convention requires. (ECtHR / HUDOC)

When Does the Process Become the Punishment?

The clearest sign that a case is being used as a weapon is what happens when the accused actually wins.

In February 2020, a court acquitted Osman Kavala in the Gezi Park case and ordered his release. That same evening, prosecutors moved to re-arrest him, and within a day he was detained again on a separate accusation. He had already spent more than two years behind bars. The acquittal changed nothing. (Human Rights Watch)

The same pattern reaches rights defenders. Dr. Şebnem Korur Fincancı, chair of the Human Rights Foundation of Türkiye, was acquitted in 2019 of “terrorist propaganda” charges tied to a press-solidarity campaign. The acquittal was then overturned and a retrial ordered. As she put it plainly, the move was “intended to punish us.” (bianet)

When an acquittal is simply the start of the next case, the verdict stops mattering. The jeopardy itself is the penalty.

What Does It Cost the People Caught in It?

The price is paid long before any judge rules, and it is paid in the ordinary materials of a life: a career, a passport, a reputation.

A lawyer named Hakan Evcin spent ten and a half months in pre-trial detention before he was acquitted. By then the damage was done. “Because I was in pretrial detention,” he told Human Rights Watch, “I have been dropped by most of my clients… Then they said sorry and acquitted me.” The apology did not bring the clients back. (Human Rights Watch)

The reach extends past the accused. Türkiye’s Interior Minister reported that 234,419 passports were revoked in connection with investigations, according to the US State Department’s human rights report, and the practice was extended even to spouses who faced no charges of their own, leaving thousands unable to leave the country or travel freely abroad. (US State Department) Assets were seized on a vast scale: official figures cited by Turkish Minute record 784 companies taken over, worth tens of billions of lira. (Turkish Minute)

These are not the consequences of a conviction. They arrive with the accusation and stay for as long as the case does, which can be years.

What Have International Courts Found?

Türkiye’s own courts and the European Court of Human Rights have repeatedly found that these prosecutions serve a purpose other than justice.

In December 2020, the European Court’s Grand Chamber ruled in the case of opposition politician Selahattin Demirtaş that his lengthy detention had “pursued the ulterior purpose of stifling pluralism and limiting freedom of political debate,” and ordered his release. (LSE Human Rights) When Türkiye refused to release Kavala despite a binding judgment, the Court took the rare step of opening infringement proceedings against the country in 2022. (Human Rights Watch)

These are not the conclusions of activists. They are the findings of Europe’s highest human rights court, about a member state.

Why Endless Investigations Still Matter

It is tempting to look at a list of eventual acquittals and conclude that the system, however slowly, worked. It did not. The years are gone. The clients did not return. The passport was dead for the time it mattered most. And the message reached far beyond the courtroom: that anyone can be put through the same machine, and that winning at the end does not spare you the cost of the middle.

Advocates of Silenced Turkey documents these cases because the harm done by an open-ended investigation is real even when no conviction ever comes, and because a process used as a punishment is still a punishment. Justice delayed, here, is not justice eventually delivered. It is the point.

The post The Hidden Cost of Endless Investigations in Türkiye appeared first on Advocates of Silenced Turkey.

This article explains what Türkiye’s anti-terror laws actually say, how ordinary expression gets reclassified as “terrorism,” who pays the price, and what international courts have already ruled about all of it.

What Does Türkiye’s Anti-Terror Law Actually Say?

The foundation is the Anti-Terror Law No. 3713, in force since 1991. Its very first article defines terrorism not by violence but by aim: any act meant to change the constitutional, political, legal, social, secular, or economic order, to weaken state authority, or to damage public order, carried out “by means of pressure, force and violence, terror, intimidation, oppression or threat.” The list is so wide that almost any organized dissent can be read into it. (Official text of Law No. 3713)

In most democratic systems, terrorism laws are written narrowly and reserved for genuine violence, precisely because a vague definition is so easy to abuse. Türkiye’s is the opposite. The breadth is not an accident of drafting. It is the feature that makes the rest of the system work.

How Can Speech Become “Terrorism”?

The answer lies in how two Penal Code articles are used together.

Article 314 punishes “membership of an armed organization” with five to ten years in prison. On its own, that sounds reasonable. But Articles 220/6 and 220/7 allow a person who acts “on behalf of” an organization, or who merely “aids” it, to be punished as if they were a member, even when they belong to no group and committed no violent act. Read together, these provisions turn writing, speaking, and association into “membership” of a terrorist organization.

This is not an activist’s interpretation. In 2016 the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission reviewed these articles and concluded they “provide for excessive sanctions and have been applied too widely, penalising conduct protected under the European Convention on Human Rights, in particular its Article 10” on freedom of expression. It urged Türkiye to read Article 314 narrowly and to delete the clause that sentences non-members as members.

Who Gets Caught in the Net?

The framework’s reach widened dramatically after the July 15, 2016 coup attempt. Türkiye declared a state of emergency that ran from 20 July 2016 until 18 July 2018, and governed through 32 emergency decrees. Public servants were dismissed by name in the annexes of those decrees, with no hearing, no trial, and a lifetime ban from public service. Roughly 125,678 people were removed through the decrees themselves, the figure that can be counted directly from the decree annexes. (European Commission 2023 Türkiye Report)

Years later, the machinery has not been switched off. The European Commission found in 2023 that human rights defenders in Türkiye still face judicial and administrative pressure “partly due to Türkiye’s broad definition of terrorism,” and that civil society organizations receiving foreign funding “risk having their activities criminalised.” Human Rights Watch counted at least 65 journalists and media workers held in pre-trial detention or serving sentences on terrorism charges tied to their reporting, with Kurdish journalists hit hardest. (HRW World Report 2023)

What Have International Courts Found?

The strongest evidence that these laws are misused does not come from advocates. It comes from courts.

Civil society figure Osman Kavala was held for years without a final conviction. In December 2019 the European Court of Human Rights found violations of his right to liberty and, tellingly, of Article 18 of the Convention, which forbids restricting a person’s rights for a hidden purpose. The Court found his detention was meant to silence him and to deter other defenders, and it ordered his release. When Türkiye refused, the Court took the rare step of infringement proceedings in 2022.

Opposition politician Selahattin Demirtaş received a similar judgment. In December 2020 the Court’s Grand Chamber found his detention had “pursued the ulterior purpose of stifling pluralism and limiting freedom of political debate,” and ordered him released. (Columbia Global Freedom of Expression)

The pattern reaches advocacy organizations head-on. Taner Kılıç, then chair of Amnesty International Türkiye, and a group of defenders detained at a 2017 digital-security workshop, were prosecuted for terrorism. After six years of proceedings, they were acquitted of all charges in 2023. And in the Academics for Peace case, more than 700 scholars who signed a 2016 petition were charged with “terrorist propaganda”; in 2019 Türkiye’s own Constitutional Court ruled the convictions violated free expression, and 491 were acquitted. (Amnesty International)

The Human Cost Behind the Cases

Every one of these cases eventually ended in a finding for the accused. But the framework does its real work long before any acquittal arrives. Years of pre-trial detention, frozen careers, cancelled passports, and public branding as a “terrorist” are not side effects of the process. For many, they are the punishment, delivered whether or not a conviction ever lands.

And the deepest cost is the quietest one. When reporting, researching, defending, or organizing can be reclassified as a crime against the state, the lesson reaches everyone watching. Editors think twice about what to assign. Lawyers think twice about which clients to take. Ordinary people think twice about what to say out loud. A charge does not have to be proven to teach that lesson.

Why Türkiye’s Anti-Terror Framework Still Matters Today

A strong, independent civil society is not a threat to a democracy. It is one of its load-bearing walls: the part of the structure that lets a society know itself, question power, and correct course. When anti-terror law is stretched to treat journalists, academics, and rights defenders as enemies, the damage runs far past the individuals named in any indictment.

Advocates of Silenced Turkey documents these cases because the people behind them are more than case numbers, and because international attention remains one of the few real checks on this system. The European Court has already named the problem in plain language. The work now is to make sure it is never quietly accepted as normal.

The post Türkiye’s Anti-Terror Framework and Its Impact on Civil Society appeared first on Advocates of Silenced Turkey.

In late 2024, the Turkish government opened what it termed a path to a “terror-free Türkiye” — a renewed initiative to resolve the four-decade conflict with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) through disarmament rather than continued military confrontation. That initiative gained significant momentum in 2025 with a public statement from imprisoned PKK founder Abdullah Öcalan calling on the organization to convene a congress and disband. By February 2026, the Turkish parliament’s commission on the peace process had agreed on legal frameworks that could open a path to conditional release for prisoners serving aggravated life sentences, including, potentially, Öcalan himself and former HDP co-chair Selahattin Demirtaş, in prison since November 4, 2016. This post explains where the process now stands, what specifically would have to change for Demirtaş to be released, and what the implications are for the broader category of political prisoners in Turkey.

What’s actually on the table

The peace initiative announced on October 22, 2024 is structurally different from earlier Turkish-Kurdish peace processes (most notably the 2013–15 round, which collapsed). Three components distinguish it:

1. A direct call from Öcalan to disband. From his prison on İmralı island, Öcalan in 2025 publicly called on the PKK to convene a congress and end its armed struggle. The PKK formally renounced armed struggle in 2025 in response. This is the first time the founding leader has issued an unambiguous public disarmament instruction. The cumulative human cost of the conflict — approximately 50,000 lives on both sides over 40 years — has been a central reference point in the public messaging from both sides.
2. Public framing from the ruling coalition. Devlet Bahçeli, leader of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and a senior coalition partner of President Erdoğan’s AKP, publicly called in February 2026 for legal pathways that would allow Öcalan’s release and for Demirtaş to “return home.” This is a notable rhetorical shift from the position Bahçeli held even in 2023.
3. A parliamentary process. A parliamentary commission was established to draft the legal frameworks needed. In February 2026, members of that commission agreed on legal changes that could open the way to conditional release for some prisoners serving aggravated life sentences — built around a principle known in Council of Europe jurisprudence as the “right to hope.”

The “right to hope” principle

The “right to hope” is established in Council of Europe jurisprudence: a person serving a life sentence must have a meaningful chance of sentence review and potential release. Sentences that are de facto permanent without any review mechanism violate Article 3 of the European Convention (prohibition of inhuman or degrading treatment).

Turkey’s “aggravated life imprisonment” sentence has been challenged on this exact ground. Multiple ECtHR judgments have signaled that, as currently structured, Turkish aggravated life sentences are inconsistent with the right to hope.

The legal reform now being drafted in the parliamentary commission would, in essence:

• Establish a periodic review mechanism for aggravated life sentences.
• Define eligibility criteria for conditional release (good conduct, completion of certain rehabilitation requirements, and so on).
• Create a procedural framework for the review hearing, including representation and right of appeal.

The framework would apply, on its face, to all prisoners serving aggravated life sentences. In practice, the political question is which prisoners would actually be released through it.

Why Demirtaş matters

Selahattin Demirtaş is the most internationally recognized Kurdish political figure currently imprisoned in Turkey. He served as co-chair of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) until his detention on November 4, 2016. He was the HDP’s presidential candidate in the 2014 and 2018 elections. He has been imprisoned for nine and a half years.

The European Court of Human Rights has ruled — twice — that his detention violates the European Convention. The Grand Chamber’s 2018 judgment (Demirtaş v. Turkey (No. 2)) found violations of Articles 5 (right to liberty), 10 (freedom of expression), 18 (limits on use of restrictions on rights), and Article 3 of Protocol 1 (free elections). The judgment ordered his release. Turkey has not implemented it.

His case is therefore significant on two distinct dimensions:

• As a domestic political marker: his release would be the clearest possible signal that the political environment around Kurdish-rights advocacy has changed.
• As an international rule-of-law marker: his release would be an act of compliance with a specific binding ECHR judgment that has been outstanding for over seven years.

Both matter. They are not the same thing.

What’s not on the table

It is important to be precise about what the peace process is and is not promising.

• It is not a general amnesty. Reports from the parliamentary commission suggest the framework being drafted would apply to specific categories of life-sentence prisoners, not to all political prisoners.
• It is not a guarantee that Demirtaş or Öcalan would be released. The framework would create a legal pathway; whether the pathway is used depends on subsequent prosecutorial and political decisions.
• It does not address the situation of the 24,000 individuals on trial and 11,640 remanded or convicted prisoners described by the Justice Ministry in connection with alleged Gülen-movement links — a separate category of political prisoner.
• It does not address ongoing prosecutions of journalists, lawyers, students, civil-society staff, or opposition figures (including İmamoğlu) who are not in the “aggravated life sentence” category.

In other words: even in the most optimistic scenario, the peace process would resolve one important category of cases. It would leave most of what AST documents — the everyday prosecutorial machinery against journalists, lawyers, and civil society — largely untouched.

What human-rights organizations are watching

Three specific markers will tell observers whether the process is generating real change:

1. Implementation of Demirtaş v. Turkey (No. 2).* ECHR judgments are binding under Article 46 of the Convention. Implementation would require either Demirtaş’s release through the new framework, or — more directly — a Turkish judicial decision releasing him in compliance with the existing ECHR ruling. Either outcome would resolve a years-long structural non-compliance.
2. Restoration of HDP/DEM Party mayors. The Turkish state replaced dozens of HDP-elected mayors in southeastern provinces with state-appointed trustees (“kayyum”) between 2016 and 2024. Genuine peace would imply restoration of those elected officials, or at minimum their reinstatement on the ballot.
3. Procedural protections for Kurdish-language reporting and political activity. A real shift would be visible in fewer prosecutions under the anti-terrorism law for Kurdish-language journalism, Kurdish cultural events, and Kurdish-rights political speech.

If the legal framework passes but those three indicators do not move, the process is — to use a precise term — symbolic. If they do move, it is structural.

What could derail it

Three risk factors are publicly identified:

• Coalition politics. The AKP-MHP coalition’s continued willingness to support a release framework depends on its electoral calculation. Significant electoral pressure from the right could reverse the rhetorical shift seen from Bahçeli.
• Domestic legal challenges. Parts of the proposed framework will face Constitutional Court review. Given the Constitutional Court’s recent track record (see related AST analysis on ECHR rulings), the outcome of those reviews is not predictable.
• External shocks. Renewed armed conflict — whether in Turkey, in northern Iraq, or in northern Syria — could produce political pressure to reverse course. The 2013–15 process collapsed under exactly such pressure.

Each of these is a real risk, not a hypothetical one.

What the international community can do

European governments and institutions have leverage that is most useful when applied specifically:

• Insist that implementation of Demirtaş v. Turkey*** be a baseline expectation in any bilateral or multilateral framework with Turkey. Not as an aspiration — as a precondition.
• Resume ENGOIA-style monitoring of HDP/DEM Party-area governance. Independent monitoring of how the peace process is being implemented at the municipal level is the most effective check against symbolic-only progress.
• Restore EU accession-process pressure on judicial reform, freedom of expression, and freedom of association. The accession framework was Turkey’s most-effective external constraint during 2003–2010. It can be again.

These are not maximalist asks. They are calibrated to the moment of opportunity that the peace process represents.

The view from AST’s mission

AST documents the people the system has silenced. The Kurdish peace process — if it produces real releases, real restorations of elected officials, real procedural protections — is one of the few mechanisms that could meaningfully reduce the population of silenced people in Turkey. That is a development worth watching closely, supporting where it produces real change, and challenging where it produces only rhetoric.

It is also a moment to remember that the people who would benefit most directly — Demirtaş, Yüksekdağ, Öcalan, and the broader population of Kurdish political prisoners — are individual people with families and decades of advocacy work behind them. The peace process is not an abstraction. It is, at its center, a question about whether named individuals will continue to grow old in prison or be released to participate in public life.

That is the question AST and its partner organizations will keep asking, on every individual case, until it is answered.

How to engage

• Track the parliamentary commission’s output. The legal text of the proposed framework, when published, will be the document that determines what the process actually does.
• Cite the binding ECHR judgments — Demirtaş v. Turkey (No. 2) and others — when the process is discussed in policy or media settings. The international legal record is the most stable reference point.
• Support the DEM Party’s domestic advocacy for resumed peace talks and political prisoner release.
• Expect symbolic moves before structural ones. Watch for the gap.

A renewed Kurdish peace process is, on its terms, the most significant opening in Turkish political-prisoner advocacy since 2015. Whether it becomes the most significant outcome depends on what happens between now and the end of 2026.

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Sources: Turkish Minute, “Erdoğan ally calls for freeing Öcalan, Demirtaş in peace push with PKK” (February 3, 2026); Turkish Minute, “Parliamentary commission backs legal steps that could pave way for Öcalan’s release” (February 4, 2026); European Policy Centre, “Türkiye’s renewed Kurdish peace process: Implications for Europe”; Kurdistan24, “DEM Party: Turkey must release Demirtas, resume peace talks with Ocalan”; PBS NewsHour, “Imprisoned Kurdish leader urges his PKK militant group to disarm”; ECtHR, Demirtaş v. Turkey (No. 2) Grand Chamber judgment (2018).

The post The Kurdish Peace Process and the Question of Political Prisoners: What Demirtaş’s Possible Release Would Mean appeared first on Advocates of Silenced Turkey.

Turkey withdrew from the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence — known internationally as the Istanbul Convention — on March 20, 2021. The withdrawal took effect on July 1, 2021. Turkey remains the only country to have ever withdrawn from the treaty, which it had been the first to ratify. Five years later, on April 22, 2026, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) adopted a resolution formally urging Turkey to rejoin the Convention. The resolution arrives against a documented femicide record in Turkey: 429 women killed in 2024 in media-reported cases, the highest annual rate since 2010. This post lays out what the Convention required, what its withdrawal removed, and what the human cost has been.

What the Istanbul Convention required

The Istanbul Convention is the most comprehensive international treaty on violence against women. Drafted under Council of Europe auspices and opened for signature in Istanbul in 2011, it commits signatory states to:

• Prevention: education, awareness campaigns, training of frontline professionals (police, healthcare, judiciary)
• Protection: shelters, hotlines, emergency barring orders, restraining orders with criminal teeth
• Prosecution: criminalization of domestic violence, sexual violence, stalking, forced marriage, and so-called “honor”-based crimes; investigation and prosecution standards that take victim safety seriously
• Integrated policies: a coordinated response across government agencies rather than fragmented per-incident handling
• Monitoring: an independent expert body (GREVIO) that evaluates each state party’s implementation

Turkey’s ratification of the Convention in 2012 had been a landmark moment in Turkish women’s-rights advocacy. Domestic Law No. 6284 — Turkey’s primary domestic-violence statute — was substantially shaped by the Convention’s standards.

What withdrawal changed

Withdrawing from the Convention did not, on its own, repeal Turkey’s domestic Law No. 6284. The statute remains on the books. But three things did change, and they have proven consequential:

1. The international monitoring framework was lost. GREVIO no longer evaluates Turkey. The country is no longer subject to the periodic compliance review process that produces public reports on shelter capacity, prosecution rates, and protective-order effectiveness. The single most important external accountability mechanism on women’s safety in Turkey is gone.
2. The political signal it sent. The Turkish government’s stated rationale for withdrawal — that the Convention “normalized homosexuality” and was “incompatible with Turkey’s social and family values” — became a public-policy posture. Public officials, prosecutors, judges, and police were reading the same signal at the same moment: that protections for women under Law No. 6284 were no longer politically prioritized.
3. The downstream effect on Law No. 6284 enforcement. Multiple reports from the UK Home Office, the International Commission of Jurists, and Turkish women’s-rights NGOs document that protective orders under Law No. 6284 have since become harder to obtain, more frequently delayed, and less consistently enforced. The statute exists; the enforcement environment around it deteriorated.

The femicide record

The most-cited figure for 2024 is 429 women killed in femicides reported by Turkish media — compiled by the We Will Stop Femicide Platform (Kadın Cinayetlerini Durduracağız Platformu), the leading Turkish NGO tracking the crisis. That figure is widely understood to undercount the actual rate, because:

• The platform records only cases reported in the press.
• Suspicious deaths classified as suicide are not counted, and women’s-rights advocates argue many should be re-investigated.
• Killings of trans women are often miscategorized in police records.

UN agencies, the European Parliament, the Council of Europe, and a long list of independent monitors have flagged the same data: femicide rates in Turkey have risen, not fallen, since the Convention’s withdrawal took effect.

The PACE resolution of April 22, 2026 frames the consequence directly: women in Turkey “are being left without key protections,” and gender-based violence “remains widespread and underreported.”

Why withdrawal happened

The proximate cause of the March 2021 withdrawal was a presidential decree — issued, notably, by decree, without parliamentary approval. The decree’s legal basis was contested at the time and remains contested by Turkish constitutional scholars who argue that international human-rights treaties require legislative concurrence to be denounced.

The political backdrop is more useful than the legal pretext. Through 2018–2021, conservative coalition partners and religious-affairs constituencies had argued that the Convention’s framing — particularly its definition of gender, its non-discrimination provisions, and its protections that apply regardless of sexual orientation — was being used to advance positions inconsistent with traditional family policy. The withdrawal was the product of that internal political pressure, not of any documented harm caused by the Convention to Turkish institutions.

International observers, including the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, characterized the withdrawal at the time as a “worrying step backwards.” That language has held up.

What the April 22, 2026 PACE resolution actually says

PACE Resolution 2026/2649 does several specific things:

• Formally urges Turkey to rejoin the Convention without precondition.
• Documents the femicide trend since 2021, with reference to NGO data.
• Highlights the structural gap left by GREVIO’s exit from the country.
• Calls on Council of Europe member states to maintain bilateral pressure on Ankara on this specific issue.
• Recommends that the EU’s accession framework with Turkey treat re-accession to the Convention as a baseline expectation, not a negotiable item.

The resolution is not legally binding. But PACE resolutions have historically functioned as the political precursor to bilateral pressure from individual European foreign ministries, and they shape the framework against which Turkey’s EU candidacy is evaluated.

The asks from the women’s-rights movement in Turkey

Turkish women’s-rights organizations — including the We Will Stop Femicide Platform, Mor Çatı, and the Federation of Women’s Associations of Turkey — have consolidated their demands around five specific points:

1. Re-accession to the Istanbul Convention.
2. Restoration of GREVIO monitoring as a confidence-building precondition for re-accession.
3. Independent investigation of suspicious deaths of women currently classified as suicides.
4. Restoration of full enforcement of Law No. 6284, with documented training of police and judicial officers.
5. Protection of women’s-rights organizations themselves, several of which have been raided, prosecuted, or had their leadership detained over the past four years.

The fifth point connects to AST’s broader civil-society reporting: the same prosecutorial machinery used against journalists and lawyers has been used against women’s-rights advocacy organizations, particularly those whose work touches on Kurdish women, refugee women, or LGBTQ+ communities.

The legal status of withdrawal

A separate strand of legal advocacy continues to challenge the constitutional validity of the 2021 withdrawal itself. The argument: a treaty ratified with parliamentary approval cannot be denounced by presidential decree alone. Multiple cases brought before Turkey’s Constitutional Court on this question were dismissed on procedural grounds in 2021–22. A reframed challenge is reportedly under preparation, building on the 2025–26 ECtHR jurisprudence that has consistently flagged Turkey’s Constitutional Court for failing to provide effective oversight (see related AST analysis on ECHR rulings).

What this means for AST’s audience

Five things to take from the anniversary moment:

• The data is unambiguous. 429 femicides in 2024 — the highest annual rate since 2010 — is the cost of the policy choice made in March 2021.
• The international system has not given up. The April 22, 2026 PACE resolution shows that European institutions continue to treat re-accession as a live ask, not a closed file.
• Turkish women’s-rights organizations remain operating despite material pressure. They are the most-credible domestic source for case documentation.
• The legal challenge to the withdrawal continues. Constitutional law is not exhausted as a strategy.
• Cross-issue reporting matters. Femicide is connected to broader judicial dysfunction, to civil-society persecution, and to the same enforcement environment AST documents in other domains.

How to act on this

• Cite the 429 figure — and the source (We Will Stop Femicide Platform) — in any policy discussion of Turkey’s withdrawal.
• Reference the April 22, 2026 PACE resolution when corresponding with elected officials in Council of Europe member states.
• Support the named Turkish women’s-rights NGOs directly. Several have publicly available donation infrastructure.
• Watch for the renewed Constitutional Court challenge — it will likely produce a document trail that policy advocates can cite.

The Istanbul Convention was named for the city that hosted its drafting. Five years after Turkey’s withdrawal, the city is still where most of the international advocacy on the Convention’s future is centered. AST’s role is to make sure that advocacy stays grounded in the specific names, the specific cases, and the specific numbers — not in slogans.

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Sources: Turkish Minute, “PACE urges Turkey to rejoin Istanbul Convention, cites ongoing violence against women” (April 29, 2026); UN Western Europe, “Turkey’s withdrawal from women’s protection treaty, ‘worrying step backwards'”; International Commission of Jurists, “Turkey’s withdrawal from Istanbul Convention a setback for women and girls’ human rights”; UK Home Office Country Policy and Information Note on Turkey (July 2025); We Will Stop Femicide Platform annual data; Wikipedia, “Istanbul Convention” (consolidated).

The post Five Years Without the Istanbul Convention: PACE Calls Turkey Back, 429 Femicides Mark the Anniversary appeared first on Advocates of Silenced Turkey.

Between 2002 and the close of 2025, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) issued 432 judgments finding that Turkey violated Article 10 (the right to freedom of expression) of the European Convention on Human Rights. No other Council of Europe member state has recorded as many Article 10 violations. In the first weeks of 2026, the Court received approximately 650 new applications from Turkey alone. The volume tells a structural story: the same legal mechanisms that produced the cases in 2005 are still producing them in 2026. This post explains what the 432-figure measures are, why it has not slowed Turkey’s pattern of free-expression prosecutions, and what implementation of these judgments would actually require.

What “432 violations” measures

The 432 figure comes from a public dataset compiled from the ECHR’s HUDOC case database, current to early 2026. It counts only final judgments on the merits in which the Court found a violation of Article 10 (freedom of expression). It does not include:

• Cases settled before judgment
• Cases ruled inadmissible
• Cases involving Articles 8, 11, or 6 alone (privacy, assembly, fair trial)
• Cases still pending

The actual underlying volume of expression-related applications from Turkey is much larger; the 432 are the cases the Court chose to examine, examined fully, and ruled against the Turkish state on. They span 23 years of jurisprudence and cover virtually every category of expression an open society would consider protected: journalism, academic publishing, social-media commentary, courtroom speech by lawyers, artistic expression, party political speech, and public-square protest.

How the violations cluster

Across the 432 judgments, three patterns dominate:

1. Anti-terrorism statutes used against speech. Turkey’s anti-terror law (Law No. 3713) is the most frequently flagged statute in ECHR Article 10 findings. Articles 6, 7, and 8 of the law have been used to prosecute statements, articles, and broadcasts that fell well within protected political commentary under European standards. The Court has repeatedly held that “advocacy” or “support” cannot be criminalized in the absence of incitement to imminent violence.
2. “Insult” provisions used against political criticism. Article 299 (insulting the President) and Articles 125–131 (general insult statutes) account for hundreds of ECHR Article 10 applications. The Court’s consistent line is that politicians, particularly heads of state, must accept a wider degree of public criticism than ordinary citizens which is a principle Turkish courts have not reliably applied.
3. Pretrial detention as the punishment. A subset of the judgments find that even when an underlying conviction was eventually overturned domestically, the pretrial detention itself violated Article 10 because it had a chilling effect on protected expression. This is a particularly important line of cases for journalists held in remand for months before trial.

The 2026 cases that didn’t change

In the first four months of 2026, three Article 10 / structural-fairness rulings against Turkey were finalized:

• March 18, 2026: ECtHR ruled Turkey violated the rights of 93 people detained over alleged Gülen links, finding systematic flaws in the evidentiary basis for terrorism-related detentions and expression-related downstream charges.
• March 23, 2026: The Grand Chamber declined Turkey’s appeal of a November 13, 2025 judgment, making the lower-chamber ruling final. The judgment found violations of Article 6 (fair trial) and pointed to structural problems in how Turkey’s Constitutional Court handles ECHR-related complaints.
• April 29, 2026: The 432-judgment milestone was reported by Turkish Minute and confirmed against the HUDOC database.

In none of the 2026 cases did the underlying domestic statute change. The same Article 217/A “spreading misleading information” prosecutions that produced the 2025 judgments continued through 2026. The same Article 299 “insulting the President” prosecutions continued. The judgments arrived; the prosecutorial conveyor belt did not stop.

Why implementation matters more than judgments

Under the European Convention on Human Rights, ratifying states have a binding obligation to implement ECtHR judgments. Implementation has three legally required components:

• Just satisfaction: Pay the financial award the Court orders. Turkey has, with some exceptions, paid these.
• Individual measures: Take steps to remedy the specific violation and release the detainee, expunge the conviction, restore the right.
• General measures: Change the underlying law or practice so the violation does not recur.

Turkey has substantially failed at the third component. The 432-judgment count is the visible signal of that failure: if general measures had been taken after the 50th judgment on Article 10, the 100th would not have arrived. If they had been taken after the 200th, the 432nd would not have. The fact that the figure is still climbing, on the same statutes and the same prosecutorial patterns, is what international institutions mean when they describe the situation as “structural.”

The most-cited recent example: Selahattin Demirtaş. The Grand Chamber of the ECtHR ruled in 2018 (and reaffirmed in subsequent judgments) that his pretrial detention violated the Convention. As of April 2026, he remains in prison. The judgment is binding under Article 46 of the Convention. It has not been implemented.

The application backlog

The 650-applications-in-six-weeks figure for early 2026 is the leading indicator. ECHR application volume is not constant; spikes correspond to identifiable domestic events. The current spike correlates with:

• The İmamoğlu prosecution and arrest of his supporters/staff
• Continuing prosecutions of HDP/DEM Party officials
• Article 217/A prosecutions of journalists
• Mass civil-society raids and the related detentions

The Court is capable of processing on the order of 2,000–3,000 Turkish judgments per year. That capacity is consumed by a domestic system that produces orders of magnitude more rights-violating decisions per year than the international system can adjudicate.

What “implementation” would actually look like

Council of Europe-aligned legal analysts have identified a short list of the most-impactful implementation steps:

1. Repeal or substantially narrow Article 299. Turkey is the only major Council of Europe member state that prosecutes ordinary citizens for “insulting the President” at scale. Repeal would close the single largest source of Article 10 violations.
2. Reform Article 217/A. The “spreading misleading information” statute, added in 2022, is the fastest-growing source of new violations. Narrowing it to require demonstrated knowledge of falsity and demonstrated harm would bring it into rough alignment with European standards.
3. End reliance on the anti-terrorism law for speech offenses. The Court has been clear, repeatedly, that political speech and journalistic reporting cannot be prosecuted as terrorism in the absence of incitement to imminent violence. Removing speech offenses from Law No. 3713’s application is implementation of decades of clear jurisprudence.
4. Structural reform of the Constitutional Court’s handling of expression cases. The March 2026 Grand Chamber ruling specifically flagged the Constitutional Court’s failure to provide effective oversight as a structural problem. Reform there is reform that compounds.

These are not maximalist tasks. They are the minimum reforms required to bring Turkey into compliance with judgments it has been bound by, in some cases, for two decades.

Why this matters for AST’s mission

AST documents specific cases including a journalist taken into pretrial detention, a lawyer charged for representing a client, a student arrested for a social-media post. The 432 figure is the cumulative record of those cases at the international level. It is also the document trail that policymakers, courts in third countries, asylum officers, and academic analysts use to characterize Turkey’s expression environment.

When AST publishes a new report on a specific named prosecution, it is adding to a record that is both legally significant and statistically growing. The work is cumulative, and so is the evidentiary weight.

What readers can do

• Cite the figure. “432 ECHR judgments since 2002” is a number that does not require interpretation. It is the kind of fact that translates across audiences — legal, journalistic, policy.
• Track new applications. The HUDOC database (linked above) is open. Readers can monitor specific cases, including AST-supported applications, as they progress.
• Pressure for implementation, not just for new judgments. The 432 number tells us judgments alone do not change Turkey’s behavior. Pressure on the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers, which supervises implementation, is where leverage now lies.

The Court has done its work. The judgments exist. The question for the next decade is whether the institutional system that produced them has the political will to insist they be implemented.

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Sources: Turkish Minute, “ECtHR found violations of freedom of expression by Turkey in 432 rulings since 2002” (April 29, 2026); ECHR Press Country Profile — Türkiye; HUDOC case database; Nordic Monitor reporting on Turkish non-compliance (March 2026); Human Rights Watch analysis of structural ECHR non-compliance.

The post 432 Times Turkey Was Found Guilty: The ECHR’s Verdict on Free Speech (2002–2026) appeared first on Advocates of Silenced Turkey.

In March 2026, Ekrem İmamoğlu, the elected mayor of Istanbul and the Republican People’s Party (CHP) nominee for the Turkish presidency, went on trial alongside more than 400 co-defendants in a corruption case the prosecution describes as a 10-year, 142-act criminal enterprise. The combined charges, if all secured a maximum sentence, would expose İmamoğlu to a notional prison term exceeding 2,000 years. He has been in pretrial detention since March 23, 2025. Human Rights Watch, the European Parliament, the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly, and a long list of domestic and international observers have characterized the prosecution as politically motivated. This post walks through the timeline, the charges, the pattern, and what it tells us about the trajectory of opposition politics in Turkey.

Timeline of the case

This is one of the largest corruption-style trials in modern Turkish history by defendant count, comparable in scale only to the post-2016 KCK and Ergenekon-era mass prosecutions.

What the indictment alleges

The November 2025 indictment frames İmamoğlu as the alleged leader of a criminal organization that committed 18 distinct corruption offenses across 142 acts, with the stated motive of “winning political power.” The charges include:

• Corruption and aggravated bribery
• Extortion
• Money laundering
• Bid-rigging at municipal-tendering bodies
• Aggravated fraud against public institutions
• “Political espionage” (added in late 2025)
• “Supporting a terrorist organization” (the prosecution alleges PKK-related links)

A central evidentiary thread relies on the testimony of cooperators (defendants who have entered into agreements with prosecutors). Defense lawyers have argued at length that those statements are internally inconsistent, coerced, or both. As of trial opening, no public-domain document corroborates the central conspiracy allegation independent of cooperator testimony.

Why human-rights organizations call this political

Human Rights Watch published its assessment on March 3, 2026, the day the trial opened. The headline was unambiguous: “Türkiye: Leading Opponent of Erdoğan on Trial.” HRW’s analysis identifies four characteristics that, in combination, distinguish a legitimate corruption prosecution from a politically motivated one:

1. Prosecutorial timing tracks political timing. İmamoğlu’s arrest fell on the morning his party nominated him for the presidency. Pre-2025, several smaller prosecutions had been initiated against him after each electoral milestone: 2019, 2022, 2024.
2. Asymmetry in scope. The indictment alleges a 10-year corruption enterprise but is built almost entirely from acts during İmamoğlu’s mayoral terms. Comparable scrutiny has not been applied to peer institutions held by ruling-coalition parties.
3. Charges proliferate after detention. Espionage charges were not in the original detention order; they were added eight months in. This pattern, the addition of new charges during detention, has become a recurring feature of Turkey’s most criticized political prosecutions, including those of Selahattin Demirtaş and Osman Kavala.
4. Prosecutorial reliance on cooperators. When the central case depends on the testimony of co-defendants who can shorten their own sentences by cooperating, the procedural risk of false statements increases sharply. International observers have flagged this specifically.

It is important to be precise: human-rights organizations have not asserted that all 400+ defendants are innocent of every act alleged. The argument is that the use of prosecution regarding its timing, scope, and the “leader of a criminal organization” framing applied to an opposition presidential candidate is what marks it as a political trial, regardless of whether individual procurement decisions did or did not cross legal lines.

The pattern: prosecuting elected opposition figures

The İmamoğlu prosecution is not isolated. Since 2016, Turkey has cumulatively imprisoned, removed from office, or replaced with state-appointed trustees a long list of elected opposition figures, particularly from the pro-Kurdish HDP/DEM Party tradition. Among the most prominent:

• Selahattin Demirtaş, former HDP co-chair, has been in prison since November 4, 2016. The European Court of Human Rights has ruled (twice) that his detention violates the European Convention. He remains imprisoned.
• Figen Yüksekdağ, former HDP co-chair, has also been detained since November 2016, on similar charges and similar ECHR findings.
• Dozens of HDP/DEM Party mayors were replaced by government-appointed trustees (“kayyum”) after their elections in southeastern provinces.

The İmamoğlu case is novel only in that the defendant is from the secular center-left CHP rather than the Kurdish-rights parties that have absorbed most of this pressure since 2016. That broadening of scope  from Kurdish opposition to mainstream secular opposition  is one of the characteristic developments of 2025–26.

What conviction would mean

A conviction on the headline charge of “leading an organized criminal enterprise” would result in immediate disqualification from holding public office. Turkey’s electoral law bars individuals convicted of certain categories of offense (including “supporting terrorism” and aggravated corruption) from running for any elected position. A convicted İmamoğlu would be barred from running for president, which, given that he was the CHP’s nominee, would effectively eliminate the most credible electoral challenge to the ruling AKP MHP coalition in the next election cycle.

That outcome is not hypothetical. Similar precedents already exist. Demirtaş’s conviction prevented his return to political life, while the disqualification of dozens of HDP mayors produced the same effect at the municipal level.

What’s happening to the protests

İmamoğlu’s March 2025 detention triggered the largest urban protests Turkey has seen since the 2013 Gezi demonstrations. The state response has been instructive:

• Mass arrests of protesters, with thousands detained in the first 30 days alone.
• Internet throttling of major platforms during the peak protest window.
• Prosecution of journalists covering the protests, including the four reporters held in remand in March 2026 (Akgül, Kılıç, Kuray, Tosun).
• Travel bans issued against student-organizers, civil-society staff, and lawyers offering pro bono representation.

Each of those responses is itself the subject of separate AST reporting. The trial is the visible center of a much wider state operation.

Procedural status as of late April 2026

As of this writing:

• İmamoğlu remains in pretrial detention at Silivri.
• The trial is expected to last months, possibly years. Mass-defendant cases of this size routinely run for 18–36 months at trial, plus appeals.
• His legal team has filed multiple applications to the Constitutional Court of Turkey and to the European Court of Human Rights.
• The European Court has indicated it will fast-track examination of any application concerning his pretrial detention.
• A wide international monitoring presence, including diplomats, parliamentary observers, and human-rights NGOs, has attended each public hearing date.

What advocacy networks are asking for

Three asks consistent across HRW, the European Parliament’s rapporteur, and the Council of Europe:

• Immediate release pending trial. Pretrial detention for periods exceeding the maximum permitted by domestic and ECHR standards.
• Severance of the cases. A prosecution combining 400+ defendants and 18 distinct alleged offenses cannot give individual defendants meaningful access to a fair process.
• Independent monitoring of the proceedings. Council of Europe institutions and OSCE/ODIHR have offered to send official trial monitors. Acceptance of those monitors is a baseline procedural request.

Why this matters beyond Turkey

The İmamoğlu trial is the case international democracy-watchers will use as a benchmark for Turkey’s 2028 election cycle. If the trial concludes in a conviction that disqualifies him from running, the outcome will set a template both for the Turkish ruling coalition and for governments elsewhere observing what does and does not produce sustained international pushback.

The advocacy work happening over the next 18–24 months around this trial is therefore not just about one mayor. It is about whether the international system that Turkey is a part of, such as the Council of Europe, ECHR, EU candidacy framework, still has the institutional weight to influence how a major member state treats its political opposition.

That is the question AST and its partner organizations are pressing on, case by case, judgment by judgment.

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Sources: Human Rights Watch, “Türkiye: Leading Opponent of Erdoğan on Trial” (March 3, 2026); HRW, “Türkiye: Court Jails Istanbul Mayor” (March 24, 2025); Al Jazeera, “Turkish court orders Istanbul mayor jailed pending trial” (March 23, 2025); Al Jazeera, “Turkiye court charges jailed opposition leader with ‘political espionage'” (October 27, 2025); ABC News and Washington Times reporting on trial opening (March 2026); Wikipedia, “Arrest of Ekrem İmamoğlu” (consolidated timeline).

The post The İmamoğlu Trial Explained: 400 Defendants, 2,000 Years, and Turkey’s Opposition on Trial appeared first on Advocates of Silenced Turkey.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) published its 2026 World Press Freedom Index on April 30, 2026, and the global picture is the worst it has been in the 25 years RSF has measured it. Turkey now ranks 163rd of 180 countries — a four-place fall from 159th in 2025 — placing it among the bottom 10% of states for press freedom worldwide. The drop tracks with what AST has documented on the ground over the past year: the pretrial detention of working reporters, the prosecution of foreign correspondents, and the use of “spreading misleading information” charges to silence newsroom investigations. This post walks through the four indicators the RSF Index measures, explains where Turkey scored lowest, and names the journalists whose recent arrests anchored the country’s decline.

What the RSF Index measures (and why a 4-place drop matters)

The Press Freedom Index scores each of 180 countries across five indicators: political, economic, legislative, social, and security. A country’s overall ranking is built from those scores; a fall of even one or two places usually reflects a measurable change on at least one indicator.

A four-place fall from 159th to 163rd is therefore not noise. It signals that on at least one indicator, Turkey’s press environment got materially worse over the previous year. RSF’s own commentary on the 2026 release pinpoints judicial harassment of journalists and economic pressure on independent outlets as the principal drivers, both areas where Turkey’s score deteriorated.

For context, a country at 163 sits below states like the Democratic Republic of Congo and Tajikistan. The Index does not weight all rankings the same; the difference between, say, 12th and 18th is small, but the difference between 159th and 163rd is the difference between “highly restricted” and “essentially captured.”

What changed in Turkey in the year measured

The 2026 RSF Index covers reporting incidents from roughly March 2025 through February 2026. Inside that window, Turkey accumulated a record of newsroom-facing prosecutions that no other Council of Europe member state matched.

Among the most-cited cases:

• Ismail Ari, a reporter for the opposition daily Birgün, was placed in pretrial detention on March 22, 2026 on a charge of “spreading misleading information.” Ari had previously won the Uğur Mumcu Investigative Journalism Award. Press-freedom advocates noted that nothing in the indictment alleged anything other than journalism.
• Yasin Akgül, Bülent Kılıç, Zeynep Kuray, and Ali Onur Tosun, four photojournalists and reporters, were arrested in March 2026 on charges of “participation in unauthorized demonstrations” while covering protests sparked by the detention of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu. They were held in remand until their release on March 27, 2026. RSF called the decisions “arbitrary.”
• Fatih Altaylı, a veteran journalist who had moved his work to YouTube, was sentenced on November 26, 2025 to four years and two months in prison for what the court characterized as a threat against President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan during a livestream. Press-freedom organizations and defense lawyers have characterized the comments as protected political commentary.
• At the time of Human Rights Watch’s most recent country writeup, 27 journalists and media workers were in pretrial detention or serving sentences in Turkey.

These are not the only cases, they are the publicly named ones. RSF’s full Turkey dossier lists prosecutions targeting smaller outlets, regional reporters, and freelance contributors who are far less visible to international observers.

How “fake news” laws became prosecutorial templates

Three legal provisions are doing most of the work in 2026:

1. Article 217/A of the Turkish Penal Code (disseminating misleading information): added in October 2022. It carries a penalty of up to three years in prison for publishing information deemed by prosecutors to threaten public order.
2. Article 299 (insulting the President): Prosecutions under Article 299 have grown roughly tenfold since 2014. Conviction can produce up to four years’ imprisonment.
3. Anti-terrorism laws (Law No. 3713): used to recharacterize editorial decisions as material support for outlawed organizations, particularly when reporting touches on Kurdish-rights coverage.

The pattern these statutes share is breadth. Prosecutors do not have to demonstrate knowledge of falsity, intent to harm, or threat of imminent violence. They have only to convince a court, frequently the same kinds of courts that have been the subject of repeated European Court of Human Rights findings, that the speech in question fits inside the statute’s elastic boundary.

What this means for the AST audience

AST has documented individual cases, including students, lawyers, civil-society staff, foreign reporters. The 2026 RSF Index is the macro number that those individual cases sum to. When a country falls four places in a global press-freedom index, what that captures, mathematically, is that the rate at which journalists are being prosecuted and the rate at which independent outlets are being economically squeezed has both accelerated.

For policymakers, that is the headline: Turkey’s press-freedom environment is not stable. It is deteriorating measurably and predictably.

For diaspora communities and former reporters now publishing from outside Turkey, the Index is also a warning. RSF’s commentary on the 2026 release noted a continuing pattern of pressure on exile media, including denial of broadcast licenses, banking-relationship terminations, and platform takedown requests, that follows journalists across borders.

What advocacy looks like from here

Three specific, evidence-based asks have emerged from press-freedom organizations responding to the 2026 Index:

• Repeal Article 217/A. The “disseminating misleading information” statute is the single fastest-growing source of journalist prosecutions in 2025–26. Council of Europe institutions, the EU Parliament’s rapporteur on Turkey, and several UN special rapporteurs have called for its repeal or substantial narrowing.
• Implement the European Court of Human Rights’ free-expression judgments. As of early 2026, the ECHR has issued 432 rulings since 2002 finding Turkey in violation of Article 10 (freedom of expression). Implementation is the legally required next step, it is not optional under the European Convention.
• End pretrial detention for journalists charged with speech offenses. Pretrial detention is supposed to be a last resort; in Turkey it has become a default for working reporters. The Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly has highlighted this specific abuse repeatedly.

These are not matters of opinion; they are grounded in agreements Turkey has already signed and rulings it is legally obligated to follow.

How to support the journalists named in this report

AST works to surface specific cases that risk being lost in aggregated statistics. Readers who want to act on this 2026 Index can:

• Share the names Ari, Akgül, Kılıç, Kuray, Tosun, and Altaylı when discussing Turkey’s press freedom decline. Specificity drives policy.
• Support legal-defense funds for accredited Turkish press organizations.
• Write to elected representatives about Article 217/A and Article 299 prosecutions.
• Subscribe to AST’s mailing list for the next case-by-case update.

Press freedom in Turkey is not declining because the world has run out of attention. It is declining because the legal and institutional mechanisms used to suppress journalism have advanced faster than the international response. The 2026 RSF Index makes that gap measurable. Closing it is precisely what AST and its partners are working to achieve.

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Sources: Reporters Without Borders 2026 World Press Freedom Index (April 30, 2026); RSF country file on Türkiye; Human Rights Watch World Report 2026 — Türkiye chapter; Al Jazeera, “Press freedom worldwide falls to its lowest level in 25 years” (April 30, 2026); Turkish Minute reporting on individual journalist cases.

The post Turkey Falls to 163rd in 2026 World Press Freedom Index: Inside the RSF Report appeared first on Advocates of Silenced Turkey.