Turkish prosecutors have ordered the detention of nine people for using an encrypted messaging app despite rulings by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) that its use alone is not sufficient to establish membership in a terrorist organization.
According to the TR724 news website, the Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office ordered the detentions as part of an investigation into what authorities describe as the civilian network of the faith-based Gülen movement, which Turkey designates as a terrorist organization.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has targeted 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. He dismissed the probes as a Gülenist conspiracy and later designated the movement a terrorist organization in May 2016, intensifying a sweeping crackdown after a failed coup in July of the same year that he accused Gülen of orchestrating. The movement denies involvement in the coup attempt or any terrorist activity.
Prosecutors said the suspects were identified as having allegedly used the encrypted messaging application ByLock, which authorities view evidence of membership.
Turkish authorities have considered ByLock to be a secret tool of communication among supporters of the Gülen movement since the coup attempt on July 15, 2016, despite a lack of evidence that ByLock messages were related to the abortive putsch.
Although the ECtHR has in many cases made clear that use of the ByLock messaging app does not constitute a criminal offense, detentions and arrests of individuals continue in Turkey for their alleged use of the ByLock application.
The move comes after a series of judgments by the European court, including a landmark 2023 ruling in the case of Yüksel Yalçınkaya, which found that Turkish courts had relied too heavily on ByLock use alone to secure convictions. The court said such an approach failed to meet the requirement that criminal liability be based on sufficiently clear, individualized and foreseeable evidence.
In that ruling, the court found that treating mere use of the application as decisive proof of membership in an armed organization, without examining message content or the individual’s specific conduct, violated Article 7 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which safeguards against punishment without a clear legal basis.
Subsequent judgments, including cases involving large groups of applicants, have reaffirmed that findings, emphasizing that evidence such as alleged ByLock use, banking activity or employment in certain institutions cannot on their own establish criminal membership without a detailed, case-by-case assessment.
Legal analysts say the latest detention orders suggest that practices criticized by the European court may still be in use, particularly in investigations where digital tools are treated as primary indicators of organizational ties.
