Nearly ten years after the failed coup of July 2016, the machinery built in its aftermath is still running. Tens of thousands of people in Türkiye remain under investigation, on trial, or behind bars on the strength of alleged links to the Gülen movement, which the Turkish government designates a terrorist organization. For the accused, the passage of a decade has not brought closure. Instead, it has created a seemingly permanent condition: remaining a suspect indefinitely, often on the basis of evidence that identifies no specific criminal act.
This article examines what the numbers actually show in 2026, the types of evidence on which these terrorism prosecutions rely, and why the European Court of Human Rights has found serious violations arising from this approach.
How Many People Are Still Being Prosecuted?
The scale is not an estimate provided by advocates. It comes from the government itself. In July 2025, Türkiye’s justice minister stated that investigations involving 58,000 people and trials involving another 24,000 were continuing over alleged links to the Gülen movement. These figures describe active cases, not a historical tally of proceedings concluded years ago. Nearly a decade after the coup attempt, the state was still investigating individuals, still holding trials, and still treating alleged affiliation as an ongoing national security concern.
Behind the case files are people already imprisoned. According to Human Rights Watch’s World Report 2026, 11,640 people detained on remand or convicted on charges related to alleged Gülen movement links remained in prison. This represents those whose prosecutions have already resulted in detention or conviction, distinct from the much larger number of people whose cases remain under investigation or before the courts.
Two things should be said plainly about these numbers. First, they are recent, drawn from a 2025 government statement and a 2026 report, and therefore reflect the situation at the time of reporting rather than a fixed final total. Second, they are large enough that the word “purge,” often used for the immediate aftermath of 2016, often used to describe the immediate aftermath of 2016, no longer fully captures what has happened.
A purge ends. This has not.
What Is the Evidence in These Cases?
The central problem is not the volume of prosecutions. It is what they are built on.
In numerous cases involving alleged Gülen links, the evidence cited is not participation in a violent act, possession of a weapon, or involvement in a criminal plot. Instead, prosecutors have relied on indicators of association, such as alleged use of a particular messaging application, maintaining an account at a particular bank, or membership in unions, associations, schools, or other institutions that had previously operated lawfully..
This raises a fundamental question about how criminal responsibility is established. Ordinarily, a terrorism prosecution should require evidence demonstrating that an individual knowingly participated in, contributed to, or furthered criminal activity. Under an association-based approach, however, ordinary activities can become retrospective indicators of criminal affiliation. Downloading an application, maintaining a bank account, working at a school, or belonging to an organization is not, in itself, an act of violence. Yet such activities have been used as evidence in prosecutions carrying some of the gravest consequences available under criminal law. The Stockholm Center for Freedom has documented this pattern of ongoing prosecutions built on such indicators across years of monitoring.
When the evidence becomes based on association rather than individual conduct, guilt risks depending less on what a person actually did than on whom or what that a person can be linked to. That is a fundamentally different and far more expansive standard of criminal liability.
What Has the European Court of Human Rights Ruled?
The most consequential judicial assessment of this approach has come not from advocacy organizations but from the European Court of Human Rights.
In its 2023 Grand Chamber judgment in Yalçınkaya v. Türkiye, the Court found violations of the European Convention on Human Rights arising from the applicant’s conviction for membership in an armed terrorist organization. Among its findings, the Court held that there had been violations of Article 7, which protects the principle that there can be no punishment without law, and Article 6 & 1, which guarantees the right to a fair trial.
Both findings matter, and it is worth being precise about what the Court held. The fair-trial violation (Article 6 & 1) concerns the proceedings including through which the applicant was convicted, including deficiencies in the domestic courts’ treatment of evidence and their failure to address essential issues raised by the defense. The no-punishment-without-law (Article 7) violation concerns legality itself: a person cannot be convicted of a criminal offense under the law while the alleged conduct was committed, and mistreating (misusing) the anti-terror law to include ordinary acts like using an app violates that basic rule.
Yalcinkaya therefore does not need to be overstated to be significant. As a Grand Chamber judgment it raises fundamental questions about the fair-trial and legality-of-punishment ruling. Within the language of binding European human rights law, the Court warns Turkiye that the post-2016 prosecutions have not been evidentiary. Yet, as the 2025 and 2026 figures indicate, the prosecutions, particularly those Gulen movement-related, have continued on a substantial scale in the years since.
The Human Cost Behind the Numbers
Statistics of this magnitude can become abstract, so it is important to remember what each number represents.
Under this system, a person may face investigation, because of a bank account, a digital connection, employment at an institution later associated with a movement or community, or other activities that were lawful when undertaken. That person may be held in pre-trial detention while the case grinds forward, and convicted on indicators that describe no act of violence at all while carrying the social and political consequences of being publicly associated with terrorism.
The 58,000 people under investigation and the 24,000 on trial are not an abstraction. Each number is a household waiting, a career suspended, a name attached to the stigma “terrorist” long before any court has weighed the facts.
For the 11,640 people already imprisoned, the cost is even more immediate. And for everyone watching, the lesson lands without a single new arrest: the ordinary marks of a life, where you bank, what you install on your phone, which school you send your children to, can later be interpreted as evidence of criminal affiliation against you.
When lawful association can later be reconstructed as evidence of criminality, the impacts extend far beyond the courtroom creating fear, self-censorship and uncertainty throughout the society.
Why This Matters Today
A terrorism framework that permits criminal responsibility to rest heavily on association rather than on demonstrable individual criminal acts does more than affect those prosecuted individuals. It dissolves the line between a citizen and a suspect, because that line is exactly what proof of conduct is meant to protect. When this boundary is violated, the protection intended for due process is weakened, even destroyed.
Europe’s highest human rights court has already identified fundamental violations of the Convention, including violations of the right to a fair trial and the principle that there can be no punishment without law. Meanwhile, the Turkish government’s own figures indicate that the investigations and prosecutions connected to alleged affiliations continue regardless, a decade on.
Advocates of Silenced Turkey documents these cases because the people behind the numbers are more than case files. Their experiences raise broader questions about the rule of law, individual criminal responsibility, freedom of association, and the long-term consequences of emergency measures that become normalized.
Nearly ten years later, the central question is no longer simply what happened after July 2016.
It is why the machinery created in its aftermath is still running.
The post The Purge That Never Ended: Gülen-Link Prosecutions in 2026 appeared first on Advocates of Silenced Turkey.
from Advocates of Silenced Turkey https://silencedturkey.org/the-purge-that-never-ended-gulen-link-prosecutions-in-2026
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