TURKİYE HUMAN RIGHTS REPORT

This report presents our findings on the alarming human rights violations that took place in Türkiye between 2016 and 2026. In this report, we focus on the systematic persecution of individuals associated — or alleged to be associated — with the Gülen Movement. The Turkish government continues to misuse anti-terror legislation to justify arbitrary detentions, prosecutions, and the long-term exclusion from social, economic, and civic life commonly referred to as “civil death.”

In an era marked by increasing authoritarianism and systematic repression, the Türkiye Human Rights Report, prepared by Stichting Justice Square, emerges as a critical document that sheds light on some of the gravest human rights violations in recent history. This report was not compiled merely to chronicle events; it was borne out of an urgent need to document a dark chapter in Türkiye’s political transformation — a time when law was suspended and repression institutionalised. Its core objective is to present to the international community the comprehensive, evidence-based scope of the violations occurring in Türkiye — especially those amounting to crimes against humanity under international law.

The record set out in this report is stark. More than 130,000 public officials dismissed by decree, without individualised reasoning or effective remedy. Hundreds of thousands detained, prosecuted and convicted under anti-terror legislation for acts that are not crimes in any recognisable legal sense — holding a bank account, subscribing to a newspaper, sending a child to a licensed school. Property confiscated on an industrial scale. Torture and ill-treatment re-emerging as systematic practice. Enforced disappearances at home and abductions abroad. And, binding it all together, the condition this report calls “civil death”: the deliberate, indefinite exclusion of a class of citizens — and their children — from economic, social and civic life.

Our conclusion is a legal one, and we do not reach it lightly. Measured against Article 7 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, the conduct documented here — imprisonment in violation of fundamental rules of international law, torture, enforced disappearance and, above all, persecution against an identifiable group on political and religious grounds — constitutes a widespread and systematic attack directed against a civilian population, pursuant to State policy. In plain terms: crimes against humanity.

This report is therefore addressed to those who retain the power, and the duty, to act: international courts and treaty bodies, national prosecutors exercising universal jurisdiction, parliaments, foreign ministries and the wider human rights community. Every finding herein is sourced, dated and verifiable. We present it as evidence — in the confidence that impunity is a policy choice of the present, and accountability the certainty of history.

Stichting Justice Square

July 2026