The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has faulted Turkey over the arrest and pretrial detention of 86 people following a failed coup in 2016 due to their alleged links to the faith-based Gülen movement, Turkish Minute reported.
The Strasbourg court announced its ruling in the case of Balıkçı and Others v. Türkiye on Tuesday. The court examined the applications jointly in a single judgment due to their similar subject matter.
The rights court unanimously ruled that Turkey violated Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights based on the absence of sufficient grounds for ordering and keeping the applicants in pretrial detention in the cases of all 86 applicants, who were held before trial for periods ranging from one year to more than four years.
The court ruled that Turkey pay each of the 81 applicants who submitted a claim for just satisfaction €3,000 in non pecuniary damages and for costs and expenses, for a total of €243,000, equal to about 12 million lira.
The applications mainly concerned the arrest and pretrial detention of the applicants in the aftermath of a coup attempt on July 15, 2016 on suspicion of membership in Gülen movement, inspired by Fethullah Gülen, an Islamic cleric who lived in exile in the United States until his death in October 2024.
Turkish 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’s followers, also known as Hizmet (Service) supporters, say they have been unfairly targeted in a campaign of political persecution aimed at silencing dissent and consolidating power. The post-coup purge has seen hundreds of thousands investigated and tens of thousands imprisoned on terrorism-related charges widely viewed as politically motivated.
The applicants, according to court documents, were charged with membership in a terrorist organization due to evidence cited by Turkish authorities such as witness statements about ties to the Gülen movement, social media posts, possession of publications linked to the movement, employment by or membership in institutions that were shut down under emergency decrees, financial contributions to movement-linked entities, attending or holding religious meetings, communication with senior figures associated with the movement, facilitating communication between followers of the movement, use of the ByLock messaging app, staying in houses linked to the movement and other activities that authorities claimed were carried out on the movement’s orders.
ByLock, once widely available online, has been considered a secret tool of communication used by supporters of the Gülen movement since the 2016 coup attempt despite the lack of any evidence that ByLock messages were related to the abortive putsch.
The judgment states that Turkish judges relied on formulaic and abstract reasoning, citing catalog offenses under Turkish criminal procedure law, the nature of the charges, the state of the evidence and the risk of flight without making any individual assessment in each case.
The court held that these grounds did not meet the standard of relevant and sufficient reasons under Article 5 of the convention.
Tuesday’s ruling is final, though subject to editorial revision. Turkey has three months to pay the damages to the successful claimants, converted into local currency at the settlement date.
The ECtHR’s ruling is one of many such findings in recent years against Turkey due to its violation of the rights of large numbers of people with alleged links to the Gülen movement who were prosecuted in the aftermath of the coup attempt.
Despite the ECtHR decisions, the Turkish government is continuing its crackdown on real and alleged followers of the movement.
According to the latest figures from the Justice Ministry, more than 126,000 people have been convicted for alleged links to the movement since 2016, with 11,085 still in prison. Legal proceedings are ongoing for over 24,000 individuals, while another 58,000 remain under active investigation nearly a decade later.
In addition to the thousands who were jailed, scores of other Gülen movement followers had to flee Turkey to avoid the government crackdown.
