Since the July 2016 coup attempt, Turkey has seen mass arrests and trials on terrorism charges of thousands of people not involved in any violent act. Among them are journalists, human rights defenders and opposition politicians tried in proceedings which rights groups have documented as politicized and unfair. While lawyers always have a critical role to play in protecting the rights of suspects in police custody and defendants in court, their role in protecting the rule of law and human rights is all the more fundamental in the context of the current crackdown in Turkey. Yet, or more likely because of that, as this report demonstrates, authorities have also targeted lawyers, in particular criminal defense lawyers.
The report examines a pattern of prosecutors investigating and opening cases against lawyers. It documents cases in which prosecuting authorities have criminalized lawyers for activities undertaken to discharge their professional duties and have associated them without evidence with the alleged crimes of their clients. Some of these prosecutions appear to have come about in reprisal for their efforts to document police abuse and other human rights violations and to protect the rights of their clients. The report also documents cases where police have threatened and intimidated lawyers, obstructing and interfering in their professional duties. The report concludes that the authorities’ unwarranted and abusive targeting of lawyers for prosecution has undermined a key guarantor of the right to a fair trial in Turkey.
The majority of those on trial for terrorist offenses in Turkey at time of writing are charged as members of what the courts and government term the “Fethullahist Terror Organization” (commonly abbreviated to FETÖ) because they accuse the movement, connected with the US-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen, of being responsible for the attempted coup. The second largest group facing terrorism charges are prosecuted as members of the armed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). A smaller number of people have been charged with terrorism offences for links to smaller outlawed leftist groups and the extremist group Islamic State (IS).
In November 2018, Ministry of Justice figures revealed that 17 percent of Turkey’s entire prison population (44,930 individuals out of the total prison population of 260,144) consisted of inmates either convicted of or on trial for terrorism offences and facing sentences typically in the range of seven and a half to twelve and a half years for membership of a terrorist organization to much higher sentences for those facing multiple charges. Tens of thousands more individuals being prosecuted for terrorism offenses are at liberty. In the period since the attempted coup, the authorities have considerably widened the already overly broad and vague definition of terrorism.
Report by the Human Rights Watch