The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has ruled that Turkey violated the rights of eight people by holding them in pretrial detention for excessive periods of time, including two for more than six years, without sufficient justification.
In its unanimous judgment delivered Thursday, the Strasbourg-based court found violations of Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which protects the right to liberty and security.
The longest periods of pretrial detention were those of former police officers Kürşat Durmuş and Erkan Ünal, who were held for more than six years, and former acting head of Turkey’s Telecommunications Directorate Osman Nihat Şen, who was jailed for more than three years. All three were prosecuted in cases involving alleged links to the Gülen movement.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has targeted the Gülen movement, a worldwide civic initiative inspired by the ideas of Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen, who died in 2024, 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 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.
The ECtHR found that Turkish courts had failed to provide relevant and sufficient reasons for ordering or extending the applicants’ detention, using repetitive reasoning in some cases, and, in two cases, relying on assumptions that lacked an evidentiary basis.
It also noted that some applicants were subject to collective detention orders and that domestic courts had failed in some cases to consider alternative measures to detention.
The court also found that Turkey violated the right to a speedy judicial review of detention in respect of five applicants, citing reviews conducted without hearings, restricted access to case files and failure to notify them of decisions concerning their detention.
The ECtHR ordered Turkey to pay the eight applicants a total of €27,100 in non-pecuniary damages as well as €250 each to four applicants who documented their claims for costs and expenses.
According to the latest figures from the justice ministry, more than 127,000 people have been convicted in cases involving alleged links to the movement since 2016, with 10,485 still in prison and legal proceedings ongoing against 83,404 individuals.
In addition to the thousands who were jailed, scores of other Gülen movement followers had to flee Turkey to avoid the government crackdown.
