Systemic Human Rights Violations in Türkiye: An Infographic Analysis (2015–2025)

Systemic Human Rights Violations in Türkiye: An Infographic Analysis (2015–2025)

This infographic booklet presents a comprehensive overview of systemic human rights violations in Türkiye between 2015 and 2025, drawing on official statistics, court data, international monitoring reports, and documented testimonies. What emerges from this ten-year snapshot is not a collection of isolated incidents, but a sustained pattern of state-driven repression that has reshaped the country’s legal system, social fabric, and everyday life.

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This infographic booklet presents a comprehensive overview of systemic human rights violations in Türkiye between 2015 and 2025, drawing on official statistics, court data, international monitoring reports, and documented testimonies. What emerges from this ten-year snapshot is not a collection of isolated incidents, but a sustained pattern of state-driven repression that has reshaped the country’s legal system, social fabric, and everyday life.

Following the political turning point of 2014 and the events of July 15, 2016, counterterrorism laws were systematically repurposed into tools of mass prosecution. Vaguely defined charges, particularly those related to “membership in an armed organization” enabled the criminalization of peaceful activities, social ties, and ordinary civic life. Millions of individuals came under investigation, hundreds of thousands were imprisoned, and entire sectors: including education, media, civil society, healthcare were dismantled through emergency decrees.

The consequences of this process extend far beyond courtrooms and prisons. As documented in the following pages, repression has produced overcrowded prisons, routine pretrial detention, widespread torture and ill-treatment, the prosecution of children, and the denial of healthcare to sick and elderly prisoners, resulting in preventable deaths. Journalists, politicians, academics, women, children, and other marginalized groups have been disproportionately targeted, while freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and the rule of law have steadily eroded.

This booklet translates complex datasets into accessible visual narratives to highlight how legal mechanisms, once designed to protect public order, have been repurposed and weaponized to suppress dissent. The data also reveal the broader cost of democratic backsliding: declining press freedom, economic collapse, mass migration, and a profound loss of trust in state institutions.

By bringing together verified figures and visual evidence, this work aims to support international accountability efforts, inform policymakers and human rights mechanisms, and give visibility to those whose lives have been irreversibly altered by these practices. The numbers presented here represent real people; families separated, futures interrupted, and fundamental rights were denied.

This is not only a record of the past decade. It is a call to recognize, document, and confront an ongoing human rights crisis.