A country does not become authoritarian overnight. Just as no building collapses because of a single crack, neither does the rule of law collapse because of a single coup, a single election, or a single court ruling. First, the language of the law changes. Then the functioning of the courts. Then the media falls silent. Universities become hesitant to think differently. Prisons grow. Passports are revoked. People begin to leave their country. Throughout all of this, life goes on; people go to work, children go to school, television stations continue broadcasting. From the outside, everything appears normal. Yet, little by little, the contract between the state and its citizens has changed.
That is precisely what makes authoritarianism so dangerous.
It builds itself, more often than not, through small acts of normalization.
Looking back over the past decade, we see thousands of news reports, hundreds of human rights reports, and dozens of international assessments on Turkey. Judgments of the European Court of Human Rights, reports by United Nations Special Rapporteurs, the U.S. State Department’s annual human rights reports, Freedom House assessments, the World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index, and countless studies prepared by national and international civil society organizations…
Most of them showed only one corner of the same picture.
The report “Systemic Human Rights Violations in Türkiye (2015–2025),” prepared by the New Jersey-based Advocates of Silenced Turkey (AST), adopts a different approach. It does not present new events or introduce new witnesses. Instead, it brings together hundreds of reports published over the last decade, official statistics, international court judgments, and the findings of human rights organizations into a single statistical map.
In this respect, the study is less a conventional human rights report than a comprehensive reference work that seeks to reveal the political anatomy of Turkey’s last decade.
The report opens with a striking proposition. Its authors argue that the developments between 2015 and 2025 should not be understood as isolated human rights violations, but as a systematic model of repression that has reshaped the legal system, the social order, and everyday life. They point to the expansion of anti-terror legislation, the criminal investigations launched against millions of people, and the dismantling of institutions ranging from schools and media organizations to civil society groups and healthcare institutions through emergency decrees. According to the report, this process has also eroded economic confidence, social solidarity, and public trust in state institutions.
The judicial statistics presented in the opening pages are striking in illustrating the scale of this transformation.
According to graphs compiled from data provided by Turkey’s Ministry of Justice, 3,979,733 criminal investigations were launched between 2014 and 2024. During the same period, 3,810,769 individuals were officially registered as suspects, while 762,688 people received prison sentences. Most notably, Article 314 of the Turkish Penal Code, “membership in an armed terrorist organization”, became one of the country’s most frequently applied criminal provisions. The report states that 2,303,967 investigations were conducted under this article alone.
These figures are remarkable in themselves.
But the real question is this:
When millions of people are investigated under the same category of offense, does this merely indicate an increase in crime?
Or has the very definition of crime itself changed?
The cornerstone of modern criminal law is the principle of individual criminal responsibility. People are prosecuted not because of their affiliations, but because of their concrete actions. In democratic legal systems, terrorism offenses are defined through objective elements such as violence, coercion, or participation in armed activities. The AST report argues, however, that following 2016, the scope of Turkey’s anti-terror legislation expanded dramatically, fundamentally transforming the country’s legal practice.
What is ultimately being debated here is the way the state defines its own citizens.
Once the state begins to judge individuals less by what they have done than by the social relationships they have maintained, the line separating law from security gradually becomes blurred.
At this point, one is reminded of Hannah Arendt’s observations on totalitarianism. According to Arendt, the defining characteristic of authoritarian regimes is not simply repression, but the destruction of legal predictability. Once people can no longer foresee which of their actions may later be considered criminal, fear ceases to be an individual emotion and becomes the prevailing climate of society.
This is precisely what makes the AST report significant.
It does not merely document changes in legal language; it also makes visible their social consequences. Passport cancellations. Dismissals from public service. Disputes over property rights. Restrictions on education. Limitations on freedom of movement. Social stigmatization. According to the report, none of these are isolated developments. They are different manifestations of the same transformation.
As I read the report, one question kept returning to my mind:
Once the language of law begins to change, where does it stop?
To search for the answer, one must turn to the following pages of the report.
For there we encounter not only courts, but children, prisons, journalists, seriously ill prisoners and, ultimately, an entire society.
From Children to Prisons: The Expanding Boundaries of the Security State
If you want to understand the true character of a legal system, begin by looking at how it treats its children.
For it is in its treatment of the powerless that the law reveals itself most clearly.
It is no coincidence, therefore, that one of the report’s most striking chapters is devoted to children.
According to the report, 2,977 children were prosecuted on terrorism-related charges in 2024 alone, and 1,051 of them were convicted. Even more striking is the age distribution. A total of 1,218 children between the ages of 12 and 14 appeared before heavy criminal courts, while 9,761 children were tried before juvenile courts. During the same year, 22,416 children received prison sentences in juvenile courts.
The statistics alone are striking.
Yet the report does more than present numbers. It uses two specific investigations—one based in Istanbul and the other in Gaziantep—to demonstrate how the concept of security has steadily expanded.
Among the activities cited in the indictments were studying the Qur’an, participating in voluntary study groups, attending social events, going bowling with friends, taking part in the Erasmus exchange program, living in shared student apartments, or maintaining certain circles of friends. The report also refers to a joint communication sent to Turkey by eight United Nations Special Rapporteurs.
The real issue here is not whether individual prosecutions were justified. The real issue is the extent to which the concept of security has expanded.
Once a state begins to view children as potential security threats, the concept of security itself begins to lose its natural limits.
This is no longer merely a matter of children’s rights.
It is a development that deserves serious attention from the perspective of the rule of law.
Why Is Torture More Than an Individual Human Rights Violation?
The second major issue emphasized in the report concerns allegations of torture and ill-treatment. According to data from the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey (TİHV), 6,249 people applied to the Foundation between 2016 and 2024, claiming that they had been subjected to torture or ill-treatment. In 2024 alone, 504 of the 697 applicants reported that they had been tortured while in official detention facilities. Moreover, 93.8 percent of the applicants stated that they had been subjected to more than one method of torture. The most frequently reported practices included physical violence, insults, threats, forced confessions, deprivation of basic necessities, and psychological abuse.
The report also offers an important caution. It notes that these figures represent only documented cases and that the actual number is likely to be much higher because of fear of retaliation, lack of confidence in effective complaint mechanisms, and a widespread perception of impunity.
From the perspective of political science, the target of torture is often much broader than the individual victim. The treatment inflicted upon a handful of people becomes a silent message delivered to millions. For this reason, torture is not merely a human rights violation. It is a mechanism of fear that reshapes the behavior of society.
What Do Prisons Tell Us Today?
There is a famous observation by Fyodor Dostoevsky:
“The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.”
Few quotations seem more relevant to understanding Turkey’s past decade.
According to the AST report, Turkey’s prison population grew from approximately 177,000 inmates in 2015 to 433,547 by November 2025. During the same period, the official prison capacity stood at 304,956, resulting in an occupancy rate of 142 percent.
In other words, Turkey today has one of the largest prison populations in Europe.
Yet the report argues that the issue is not simply the size of the prison population. What is equally significant is the gradual transformation of pretrial detention from an exceptional measure into an ordinary judicial practice.
The report’s graphs clearly show that while pretrial detainees accounted for roughly 15 percent of the prison population in 2015, that figure rose to approximately 36 percent within a relatively short period.
This represents an important paradigm shift in criminal justice.
In democratic legal systems, detention before trial is an exceptional measure designed to safeguard the judicial process. The report argues, however, that over time it has increasingly evolved into a form of punishment in itself.
The Question of Seriously Ill Prisoners
One of the report’s most striking sections concerns elderly and seriously ill prisoners.
According to the report, as of 2025 Turkish prisons hold 1,412 seriously ill prisoners, 5,864 elderly prisoners, and 269 prisoners with disabilities. The report also discusses in detail delayed hospital transfers, medical examinations conducted while prisoners remain handcuffed, procedures before the Council of Forensic Medicine, and difficulties in accessing medical treatment. It further includes the names of numerous prisoners who reportedly lost their lives after being denied adequate healthcare.
At this point, what is really being debated is a constitutional state’s philosophy of punishment.
Is punishment simply the deprivation of liberty?
Or has imprisonment become a new legal status in which even the right to healthcare is effectively suspended?
This is a question that concerns every democratic state governed by the rule of law.
When Journalists Are Silenced, Who Is Left to Speak?
The report’s chapter on the media paints a similarly troubling picture. It states that 131 media outlets were shut down through emergency decrees, 567 journalists were imprisoned, 3,802 press cards were revoked, and access to 1,297,000 websites was blocked. It also notes that Turkey’s position in the World Press Freedom Index fell from 138th place in 2010 to 159th in 2025.
Why Is the Rule of Law Also an Economic Issue?
One of the report’s most revealing graphics is the Rule of Law Index prepared by the World Justice Project. According to the graph, following 2014 Turkey steadily declined from 65th to 118th place among 143 countries.
Immediately beside it appears another graph.
This time the source is Freedom House.
According to its findings, Turkey’s freedom score declined by 28 points in just four years, placing the country in the category of “Not Free.”
Is There a Relationship Between Human Rights and Inflation?
The final pages of the report bring together a number of economic indicators: Turkey’s rise in global inflation rankings, the depreciation of the Turkish lira against the U.S. dollar, the dramatic decline in the purchasing power of the 200-lira banknote, rising bread consumption, and other economic data.
The report does not claim that human rights violations are the sole cause of Turkey’s economic crisis.
It does, however, draw attention to an important relationship. When institutional confidence erodes… When the rule of law weakens…When the judiciary ceases to be predictable…The economy does not remain unaffected.
For this reason, the report argues that the quality of human rights, the rule of law, and democracy is also an economic issue.
Europe’s Mirror Held Up to Turkey
One of the strongest sections of the AST report is the chapter that systematically examines the case law of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) concerning Turkey. At this point, the discussion moves beyond Turkey’s domestic politics and legal system into the realm of international law. In other words, the central question becomes the extent to which Turkey’s legal practice conforms to the standards established by the European Convention on Human Rights, to which it is a party.
According to the report, the ECHR has issued 6,884 judgments finding violations against Turkey to date. More than 21,000 applications remain pending before the Court, suggesting that the picture is far from complete. These figures alone cannot determine the merits of every individual case. Nevertheless, the fact that Turkey has consistently ranked among the Council of Europe’s member states with the largest number of applications and findings of violations points to structural problems. For this reason, the report views ECHR statistics as a mirror reflecting the relationship between Turkey’s legal system and international human rights standards.
The report pays particular attention to Article 7 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the principle of “no punishment without law.” One of the cornerstones of modern criminal law, this principle guarantees that an act cannot be punished through interpretations developed after the fact if it was not criminal at the time it was committed. The principles of legal certainty and foreseeability naturally flow from this rule.
Within this framework, the AST report examines together the cases of Yüksel Yalçınkaya, Karslı, Bozkuş, Demirhan, and others. It notes that the European Court of Human Rights found violations of Article 7 in relation to 1,808 individuals. What these judgments have in common is that they raise serious questions concerning the foreseeability of criminal liability and the principle of legality. Consequently, what is at issue here is not merely a series of individual cases, but an international legal assessment of how one of the most fundamental principles of criminal law has been applied.
For that reason, the Yalçınkaya judgment and the line of cases that followed it should be understood as a mirror held up by European human rights law to Turkey’s criminal justice system.
A Convergence Across International Reports
Another important point emphasized by the AST report is the remarkable consistency among the assessments made by international institutions over the years. The report examines the U.S. State Department’s annual human rights reports published between 2016 and 2024, classifying the findings on Turkey under 17 major categories. These include concerns over judicial independence, arbitrary detention, political prisoners, torture and ill-treatment, prison conditions, restrictions on freedom of expression and the press, internet censorship, pressure on civil society, labor rights, corruption, women’s rights, child labor, and several other issues.
What stands out in this section is not simply the individual allegations of violations but their continuity over time. The graphs demonstrate that the same concerns recur year after year and, in several areas, continue to expand in scope. In other words, the report points not to isolated crises but to structural patterns that have repeatedly appeared in international assessments.
More importantly, the AST report does not rely solely on the findings of the U.S. State Department. It places the Freedom House freedom scores, the World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index, judgments of the European Court of Human Rights, reports by United Nations Special Rapporteurs, and other international sources on the same timeline. Although these institutions differ in methodology, institutional structure, and field of expertise, their findings converge in striking ways: indicators measuring the rule of law continue to decline, freedom scores deteriorate, press freedom weakens, judgments finding human rights violations increase, highly qualified people continue to emigrate, and economic indicators worsen.
If the rule of law is deteriorating, freedoms are shrinking, judgments finding human rights violations are increasing, highly skilled people are leaving the country, and economic indicators are worsening, all during the same period, can these developments truly be explained as entirely unrelated phenomena?
The report’s greatest contribution is not that it offers a definitive answer to this question, but that it demonstrates why the question itself must now be taken seriously. It is a question that is likely to occupy lawyers, political scientists, and historians who will one day write the history of contemporary Turkey.
Read the full report:
