Over the past decade, Turkey has witnessed not merely a decline in human rights protections, but the systematic weaponization of law itself. What was once framed as an “exceptional” response to security concerns has hardened into a permanent governing strategy: the use of courts, counterterrorism legislation, and emergency-era jurisprudence to silence dissent, criminalize association, and punish thought rather than action.
This reality has been extensively documented by international human rights organizations. Amnesty International has shown how vague and overly broad counterterrorism laws have enabled mass prosecutions disconnected from individualized evidence. The World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT) has detailed how Turkey’s counterterror framework has been instrumentalized to target human rights defenders, lawyers, journalists, and civil society actors. Women journalists, in particular, face an intensified form of repression, as feminist critique and independent reporting are met with gendered harassment, prosecutions, and judicial intimidation—what Women in Journalism has aptly described as the “weaponization of the courts.”
At the heart of this crisis lies a profound judicial backlash: courts no longer act as safeguards against state abuse but function as extensions of executive power. This is most evident in cases related to alleged membership in terrorist organizations, where Turkish courts have relied on categorical assumptions rather than concrete criminal conduct. One of the most striking examples is the treatment of ByLock—an encrypted messaging application—as automatic proof of terrorist affiliation, without assessing intent, context, or individual behavior.
At the heart of this crisis lies a profound judicial backlash: courts no longer act as safeguards against state abuse but function as extensions of executive power. This is most evident in cases related to alleged membership in terrorist organizations, where Turkish courts have relied on categorical assumptions rather than concrete criminal conduct. One of the most striking examples is the treatment of ByLock—an encrypted messaging application—as automatic proof of terrorist affiliation, without assessing intent, context, or individual behavior.
The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has repeatedly condemned this practice. In its Grand Chamber judgment in Yüksel Yalçınkaya v. Türkiye, the Court made clear that conviction based solely on ByLock use violates the principles of legality and fair trial under Articles 7 and 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Yet Turkish courts continued to apply the same flawed logic.
On 16 December 2025, the ECtHR once again reaffirmed this position in a series of Committee judgments—Emre v. Türkiye, Bozyokuş and Others, Karslı and Others, and Seyhan and Others v. Türkiye—covering 2,420 applications. The Court unanimously found violations of Article 7 and/or Article 6 §1, emphasizing that Turkey’s blanket and automatic treatment of ByLock use creates systemic violations, enabling arbitrary prosecution and punishment on a massive scale. Crucially, the Court underscored that these are not isolated judicial errors but the result of an entrenched and unlawful judicial practice.
Despite these binding rulings, thousands remain imprisoned under the same discredited reasoning. This persistent non-compliance reveals the depth of Turkey’s rule-of-law crisis: international legal obligations are acknowledged rhetorically yet ignored in practice, while domestic courts continue to reproduce injustice.
Human rights abuses in Turkey today are not accidental; they are administratively produced, legally justified, and judicially enforced. As long as law is used as a weapon rather than a shield,
democracy cannot be restored through elections alone. Meaningful change requires dismantling the architecture of repression—reviewing wrongful convictions, releasing those unjustly imprisoned, and restoring judicial independence in substance, not name.
The struggle for human rights in Turkey is therefore not only about individual cases, but about reclaiming law itself from authoritarian capture.
Dr. Hafza Girdap
Spokesperson & Program Director, Advocates of Silenced Turkey (AST)
Assistant Professor, Hofstra University
Sources:
- https://www.amnesty.org/es/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/EUR4442692021ENGLISH.pdf
- https://www.omct.org/en/resources/reports/turkey-the-instrumentalization-of-the-counter-terrorism-legislation-and-policies-and-their-impact-on-hrds
- https://www.womeninjournalism.org/infocus-all/weaponizing-the-courts-erdoans-escalating-legal-repression-of-women-journalistsfb66sa84yjew88db3fp8nfdcbt2sfy
- https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/app/conversion/pdf/? library=ECHR&id=003-8412266-11901586&filename=Judgments%20and%20decisions%20of%2016.12.2025. pdf
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from Advocates of Silenced Turkey https://silencedturkey.org/weaponized-law-and-judicial-backlash-in-turkey-when-courts-become-instruments-of-repression
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