On July 15, 2016, a coup attempt failed in a single night. The purge that answered it never ended. Ten years on, this is what a country looks like when the law becomes an instrument of the state.
The coup failed. The purge did not.
In the West it is remembered as a headline that faded: tanks on a bridge, a long night, an announcement by morning that the government had held. Inside Türkiye, that night was not an ending. It was a beginning. What followed was not the prosecution of plotters. It was the removal of an entire class of people from public life, by name, without a hearing, in the annexes of emergency decrees.
A decade later, the emergency is officially over and the machinery it built is still running. Teachers and judges remain barred from their professions for life. Tens of thousands sit in prison on charges that name no violent act. The country's leading opposition figure is on trial in a case with 407 defendants. Journalists are pulled from their homes before dawn. Advocates of Silenced Turkey exists to keep this on the record, because a wrong left unrecorded for long enough starts to look like the ordinary order of things.
Roughly 162,000 people were removed through emergency decrees, dismissed by name in the annexes with no hearing, no evidence read aloud, and no route of appeal. Each dismissal carried a lifetime ban from public service. For a teacher or a nurse or an engineer whose career had been built inside public institutions, the decree did not pause a livelihood. It ended one.
A June 2026 report calls the result "civil death": victims keep their citizenship on paper but are shut out of employment, banking, the professions, and civic life. A decade after the emergency ended, only a fraction have been reinstated. The purge was never a single act. It hardened into a permanent status. Independent legal scholarship has concluded that removals on this scale, without individual due process, cannot be reconciled with Türkiye's obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights.
Ekrem İmamoğlu, the elected Mayor of Istanbul and the government's strongest challenger, was jailed on March 23, 2025, the same day his party was to confirm his presidential candidacy. The main trial opened in March 2026 with 407 defendants and an indictment spanning 142 alleged acts across ten years.
The sentence figures are staggering, and precision matters. Human Rights Watch reports a potential exposure of up to 1,929 years if convicted on all counts. Prosecutors are reported to have sought up to 2,352 years. Neither is a sentence that has been handed down. As of early July 2026, there is no conviction and the trial is ongoing. That distinction, between a demand and a verdict, is exactly what a fair process is meant to protect, and exactly what a decade of these cases has worn away.
When a signature, an app on a phone, or a bank account can be read as evidence of terrorism, no one who lived an ordinary life is safe from the charge.
In July 2026, Türkiye's own justice minister put the ongoing caseload in the open: investigations against 83,404 people and trials of 33,827 more, all over alleged links to the Gülen movement. According to Human Rights Watch, 10,485 people remanded or convicted on such charges remained in prison.
The proof in a great many of these cases is not a weapon or a plot. It is association: alleged use of a messaging app, an account at a particular bank, membership of a lawful union or school. In 2023, the European Court of Human Rights ruled in the Yalcinkaya case that convicting on this kind of evidence breached the right to a fair trial and the principle that there can be no punishment without law. The prosecutions have continued at scale regardless.
On July 5, 2026, in pre-dawn raids across at least eight cities, Turkish authorities detained three journalists: Buse Söğütlü of T24, Ceren Erdoğdu of OdaTV, and Abbas Vural of Niha+/Bianet. They were held for twenty-four hours without access to a lawyer. The timing was not incidental. It came days before a NATO summit brought the world's press to Ankara.
Press freedom is the early-warning system of the rule of law. It is the first institution an eroding state needs to neutralize, because it is the one that exposes the rest. Detaining reporters right before a moment of maximum visibility is not a coincidence to be explained away. It is a message about who is permitted to speak while the cameras are pointed at the capital.
On July 7 and 8, 2026, NATO held its summit in Ankara, drawing the leaders of all thirty-two member states. They arrived into a city under a thirteen-day ban on all public assembly, from June 28 to July 10, with at least 209 people detained in raids days earlier. Human Rights Watch called it "ruthless intolerance" of peaceful dissent. Amnesty International called the ban "excessive and unjustifiable."
An alliance that defines itself by shared democratic values conferred, at the highest level, in a capital where the right to gather had been criminalized for nearly two weeks. The conditions were not hidden. They had already been documented. The leverage to say so plainly existed. Whether it was used is the question the summit leaves behind.
Advocates of Silenced Turkey documents these cases because the people behind them are more than case numbers, and because sustained international attention remains one of the few real checks on this system. Read the evidence. Then help us keep it in view.