The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) ruled on Tuesday that Turkey violated a university lecturer’s right to a fair trial by upholding his 2016 dismissal over alleged links to the faith-based Gülen movement without giving him a real chance to challenge the claim that he used the encrypted ByLock messaging app.
The judges said Turkish courts failed to properly examine the dismissal of İ.Ç., a history lecturer at a university in Ankara, who was removed from his job in August 2016 after authorities claimed he was a user of ByLock, an encrypted messaging application that Turkish authorities consider a secret tool of communication among supporters of the movement. The court accepted that claim without requiring any documents or technical data to verify it and without giving İ.Ç. a real chance to challenge it, the Strasbourg court said.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been targeting followers of the Gülen movement, inspired by the late Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen, since corruption investigations in December 2013 implicated him as well as some members of his family and inner circle.
Dismissing the investigations as a Gülenist coup and a conspiracy against his government, Erdoğan began to target the movement’s members. He designated the movement as a terrorist organization in May 2016 and intensified the crackdown on it following an abortive putsch in July of the same year that he accused Gülen of masterminding. The movement strongly denies involvement in the coup attempt or any terrorist activity.
ByLock, once widely available online, has been considered a secret tool of communication among supporters of the movement since the coup attempt on July 15, 2016, despite the lack of any evidence that ByLock messages were related to the abortive putsch.
In September 2023 the Grand Chamber of the ECtHR ruled that the use of ByLock does not constitute a criminal offense.
İ.Ç. was dismissed in August 2016 under an emergency decree adopted after the coup attempt. His university initially told him only that his contract had been terminated under the decree. When he challenged the decision in court, the university said it had acted after receiving letters from the Turkey’s Council of Higher Education (YÖK) stating that his name appeared on a list of ByLock users.
At a hearing in March 2017 İ.Ç. asked the judges to require the authorities to produce the information and documents behind the ByLock claim so he could contest whether it was accurate. The court refused without explanation and upheld his dismissal, ruling that it was based on a valid reason under the emergency laws.
The European court said that approach created a fundamental imbalance because the employer and the government were allowed to rely on undisclosed allegations, while İ.Ç. was denied any meaningful opportunity to challenge the basis of his firing. Given the nature of the allegations, the judges said the domestic courts were required to apply particularly careful scrutiny.
Turkey argued that the case had to be viewed in the context of the state of emergency declared after the 2016 coup attempt. The European court rejected that defense, saying the emergency decrees did not clearly remove the power of courts to review dismissals and that even under emergency rule judges must provide enough oversight to prevent arbitrary decisions.
Following the coup attempt, the Turkish government declared a state of emergency (OHAL) that remained in effect until July 19, 2018. During this period, the government carried out a purge of state institutions under the pretext of an anti-coup fight by issuing a number of government decrees, known as KHKs. Over 130,000 public servants, including 4,156 judges and prosecutors, as well as more than 24,000 members of the armed forces were summarily removed from their jobs for alleged membership in or relationships with “terrorist organizations” by emergency decree-laws subject to neither judicial nor parliamentary scrutiny.
Former public servants were not only fired from their jobs but also banned from working again in the public sector and getting a passport to seek employment abroad. The government also made it difficult for them to work formally in the private sector. Notes were put on the social security database about dismissed public servants to deter potential employers.
As a result, many purge victims have had to work in uninsured jobs with very little workplace safety. There have also been several cases where former public servants have died due to occupational accidents in physically demanding jobs.
In recent years, some of the people fired have been reinstated, yet this process has often come too late. Numerous cases have surfaced where dismissed individuals, facing severe emotional and financial strain, have died by suicide or otherwise passed away before their reinstatement.
