The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) ruled Tuesday that Turkey violated the rights of 26 people jailed pending trial over alleged links to the faith-based Gülen movement, finding that Turkish courts had failed to provide sufficient justification for their detention following a coup attempt in 2016.
In its unanimous judgment, the Strasbourg-based court found violations of Article 5 § 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which protects the right to liberty and security, concluding that Turkish courts had relied on general and stereotyped reasoning rather than individually assessing the need for detention.
The 26 applicants were jailed pending trial on suspicion of membership in an armed terrorist organization, with their detention lasting as long as 11 months.
According to the judgment, most of the applicants were subsequently convicted of membership in an armed terrorist organization by trial courts, while some cases remained pending on appeal or before the Constitutional Court.
Evidence cited by Turkish authorities included witness statements, employment at or membership in institutions linked to the Gülen movement, possession of publications associated with the movement, alleged financial support for the movement and alleged use of ByLock, an encrypted messaging app once widely available on Apple’s App Store and Google Play. Turkish authorities claim the app was used as a secret communication tool by Gülen supporters.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has targeted the faith-based Gülen movement, inspired by Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen, who died in 2024, since corruption investigations in December 2013 implicated Erdoğan as well as some members of his family and inner circle. He dismissed the probes as a Gülenist conspiracy and designated the movement as a terrorist organization in May 2016, intensifying a sweeping crackdown after the coup attempt in July of the same year that he accused Gülen of orchestrating. The movement denies involvement in the coup attempt or any terrorist activity.
Turkish courts justified the applicants’ pretrial detention by citing the seriousness of the charges, the severity of potential sentences and a legal presumption favoring detention for certain serious offenses. They also cited risks of flight or evidence tampering and maintained that alternatives to detention would be insufficient.
The ECtHR found that the grounds cited by Turkish courts were not sufficient to justify the applicants’ detention. It said that legal presumptions or the seriousness of the charges could not replace concrete facts demonstrating the need for detention.
The court also found that Turkey had not established that its derogation from the convention under Article 15, which allows countries to temporarily suspend certain obligations during a public emergency, justified the failure to meet these requirements, particularly since the applicants had spent all or most of their pretrial detention after a state of emergency that ended in July 2018.
The ECtHR did not separately examine whether the applicants’ detention was based on reasonable suspicion, finding this unnecessary after ruling that Turkish courts had failed to provide sufficient reasons for their pretrial detention.
The court ordered Turkey to pay each applicant a lump sum of €1,500 for non-pecuniary damages and costs and expenses.
In a landmark 2023 ruling in Yüksel Yalçınkaya v. Türkiye, the ECtHR found that a former teacher’s conviction, based on decisively on his use of ByLock and other alleged Gülen-linked activities, such as having an account at a movement-affiliated bank, violated his rights to a fair trial, no punishment without law and freedom of association.
According to the latest figures from the justice ministry, more than 127,000 people have been convicted of alleged links to the movement since 2016, with 10,485 still in prison and legal proceedings ongoing against 83,404 individuals.
This article is republished from the Stockholm Center for Freedom.