Handwritten records filed with Turkey’s top appeals court have exposed an early blueprint for President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s takeover of the judiciary, showing that senior Justice Ministry officials began mapping judges, building the bloc that later won control of the judicial governing board and drafting ways to clear rivals from the high courts months before corruption investigations shook his government in December 2013, a drive followed by the dismissal of more than 4,000 judges and prosecutors after a failed coup in 2016.
The 15 pages, published Thursday by the Turkish TR724 news website, contain the names of 103 Supreme Court of Appeals members divided among 11 groups on squared notebook paper, with checkmarks, crosses, plus signs and letter codes beside many names.
An official cover letter says the pages came from evidence attached to former Justice Ministry Undersecretary Birol Erdem’s defense and were sent to the court’s 9th Criminal Chamber in 2019.
The chamber’s 321-page ruling records the same main list, group sheets and handwritten notes, along with Erdem’s account of the project and testimony from judges and prosecutors who witnessed it.
Erdem, who also sat on Turkey’s then Supreme Board of Judges and Prosecutors (HSYK), was one of the most powerful officials in a system that controls judicial appointments, transfers, promotions and disciplinary measures.
Erdem told the court that in 2013 he instructed Abdullah Şahin, a deputy manager in the ministry’s personnel department, to identify members of the faith-based Gülen movement before the 2014 HSYK election.
“If we want to win the 2014 HSYK election, we must know this structure’s likely strength and members,” Erdem recalled telling Şahin.
Şahin and ministry official Kemal Açıkgöz returned six to eight weeks later with a list covering the administrative courts, Erdem said.
The operation identified 434 judges in the administrative branch, while a survey of the criminal and civil courts had reached roughly 1,500 names by the end of 2013, according to a document Erdem submitted.
Erdem also compiled “who is who” notes on senior judges and circulated the lists through 10 channels to political, judicial and intelligence officials, with recipients named in the case ranging from the National Intelligence Organization (MİT) chief Hakan Fidan to ministers and senior lawmakers.
The records show that Erdem and senior judge İbrahim Okur convened members of the Supreme Court of Appeals, Turkey’s top appeals court, and the Council of State, its highest administrative court, at the Judges’ House in Ankara in June and July 2013.
The chamber found that the meetings brought together 51 Supreme Court of Appeals members and 33 Council of State members to identify suspected Gülen affiliates, organize judges outside the movement into consultation groups and influence court leadership contests and future HSYK elections.
The new handwritten roster maps that second group: 103 Supreme Court of Appeals judges classified into numbered teams, with names crossed out, moved between groups or marked with symbols as the plan took shape.
The files push the start of the organized campaign back months before the corruption investigations of December 17 and 25, 2013, which implicated Erdoğan’s ministers, business allies and family members and triggered the crackdown on the Gülen movement.
Erdoğan called the investigations a Gülenist conspiracy and a judicial coup, reassigned thousands of police officers and judges and began remaking the institutions overseeing the courts.
Yet Erdem’s account shows that the personnel mapping, high court meetings and plans for the 2014 judicial election were already underway before those investigations became public.
The 9th Criminal Chamber found that the 2013 meetings laid the foundation for the Unity in the Judiciary Platform (YBP), the government-backed slate that won eight of the 10 elected seats on the HSYK in October 2014.
Erdem also prepared two legal routes for reshaping the high courts: appointing enough judges working with the government to dilute judiciary’s independence or ending the tenure of those identified as anti-government.
Mustafa Elçim, a former Council of State member, testified that Erdem kept a draft law ending high court terms ready during a 2013 leadership election and used it to pressure judges over their votes.
Parliament adopted Law No. 6723 on July 1, 2016, two weeks before the coup attempt, terminating most existing memberships in both high courts and requiring the HSYK to choose replacements within five days after the law took effect on July 23.
The law cut membership at the Supreme Court of Appeals from 516 to 310 and at the Council of State from 195 to 116.
On July 25, 10 days after the coup attempt, the HSYK selected 267 Supreme Court of Appeals members in a secret ballot.
A comparison found that 45 of the 103 judges on the handwritten roster were among those chosen again.
The roster contains Muhsin Şentürk, the current chief public prosecutor at the Supreme Court of Appeals, along with İsmail Rüştü Cirit and Mehmet Akarca, both of whom later led the court.
Within a week of the coup attempt, the HSYK suspended 3,508 judges and prosecutors, one fifth of Turkey’s judiciary.
By 2018, 4,399 judges and prosecutors had been dismissed, 454 of whom were later reinstated, the European Commission recorded.
The Turkish government designates the Gülen movement a terrorist organization and accuses it of orchestrating the failed 2016 coup, a charge the movement denies.
The European Commission concluded in its 2025 Turkey report that the judiciary was under executive control, targeted opposition figures while sparing pro-government officials and had driven public trust in the legal system to an all-time low.
The same court record that charts this shift ended with Erdem’s acquittal on a charge of membership in an armed terrorist organization.
The chamber accepted the meetings, lists, delivery network and legal planning as facts, then treated Erdem’s campaign against the Gülen movement as evidence that prosecutors had not established the his alleged membership in the same group.
The Supreme Court of Appeals’ General Assembly of Criminal Chambers upheld Erdem’s acquittal in 2022, leaving the account of how the state mapped, grouped and replaced its judges embedded in one of Turkey’s highest court rulings.
This article is republished from Turkish Minute.
