The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) ruled Tuesday that Turkey violated the rights of 239 people convicted of terrorism offenses due to their alleged ties to the faith-based Gülen movement, finding that the Turkish judiciary failed to ensure fair trials and imposed criminal penalties without a clear legal basis, Turkish Minute reported.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been targeting followers of the Gülen movement, inspired by the late Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen, since corruption investigations revealed in 2013 implicated then-prime minister Erdoğan as well as some of his family members 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.
The ruling marks the first group of follow-up decisions after the court’s 2023 “pilot judgment,” a decision that aims to address not only the individual case before the court, but also similar cases that are pending or may arise in the future, in the case of Yüksel Yalçınkaya. The ECtHR ruled in the Yalçınkaya case that the conviction of a teacher, based on his use of the ByLock messaging app, affiliation with a union and account at Bank Asya, violated his rights to a fair trial, freedom of association and protection from retroactive criminal charges. The judgment has broad implications as it could affect thousands of similar cases in Turkey.
The ECtHR ruled on Tuesday that Turkish courts violated Article 6 § 1 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which guarantees the right to a fair trial, and Article 7, which enshrines the principle that there can be no punishment without a law clearly defining the criminal offense.
The judgment said that Turkish authorities convicted the applicants with ByLock usage playing a decisive role, but not the sole one.
Other evidence cited in some cases included applicants’ membership in trade unions, associations or foundations deemed to be affiliated with the Gülen movement; employment by institutions or companies linked to the group; financial activities at Bank Asya; possession of publications or materials associated with the group; participation in trips, demonstrations or donations connected to its networks; social media posts in its favor; residence in dormitories affiliated with the group; use of other messaging apps such as Kakao Talk or Eagle; and call records indicating communication with individuals facing similar charges.
In some cases courts convicted applicants without even waiting for the full submission of detailed ByLock findings or decrypted content. The mere establishment of use of the application was deemed sufficient for conviction, regardless of the nature or context of the communications.
The 239 applicants were convicted between 2017 and 2019. Many were civil servants, educators and private-sector workers who were swept up in the mass crackdown that followed the 2016 coup attempt in Turkey. Authorities have used the presence of ByLock on mobile devices as a key piece of evidence in tens of thousands of terrorism-related prosecutions.
The Strasbourg-based court concluded that the Turkish judiciary relied on ByLock metadata and usage records provided by the country’s intelligence services, without giving defendants sufficient access to the underlying data or the ability to challenge its accuracy or interpretation. This, the court said, gave an unfair advantage to the prosecution and made the trials fundamentally unbalanced. The applicants were also denied proper judicial reasoning, as courts frequently reproduced template judgments and failed to explain how the evidence proved individual guilt.
In its 2023 pilot judgment in the case of Yalçınkaya, the court had already declared that Turkey’s use of ByLock as the decisive basis for criminal convictions posed a systemic problem. That decision, issued by the Grand Chamber, called on Turkey to adopt general measures to prevent similar violations and to ensure retrial rights for those affected. Tuesday’s chamber judgment in Demirhan and Others v. Türkiye is the first time the European court has applied the Yalçınkaya precedent to a group of follow-up applications.
The court noted that it had already given notice to Turkey in over 5,000 similar applications following the Yalçınkaya judgment and that many more were still pending. It emphasized that the applicants in the current case were convicted using the same methods and under the same legal framework as Yalçınkaya, and therefore their cases were similarly flawed. The court dismissed the Turkish government’s arguments that its counterterrorism strategy justified the evidentiary shortcuts and found no reason to depart from the findings of the pilot judgment.
Although the court ruled in favor of the applicants, it declined to award financial compensation, stating that the acknowledgment of rights violations was sufficient satisfaction. It also rejected the applicants’ claims for legal costs.
Judge Oddný Mjöll Arnardóttir of Iceland issued a separate opinion disagreeing with this aspect of the ruling, arguing that the court should have granted damages given the severity of the violations and their long-term impact on the applicants’ lives.
Turkish Judge Saadet Yüksel dissented from the majority opinion entirely, maintaining her position from the Yalçınkaya case that Turkey’s trials had respected national and international standards.
The court stated that the violations identified in this judgment and the Yalçınkaya case “disclose a systemic problem connected with the judicial practice in Turkey.” It reiterated that Turkey is obligated under Article 46 of the European Convention to adopt general measures to address the root causes of these violations. This includes changing domestic case law, enabling retrials and ensuring that the use of digital evidence meets standards of legal certainty and individual assessment.
Under Turkish law, individuals whose convictions have been found to violate the European Convention on Human Rights have the right to request retrial within one year of the judgment becoming final. The court’s ruling will become final in three months unless one of the parties requests a referral to the Grand Chamber. If no such referral is accepted, the 239 applicants may petition Turkish courts for retrial under Article 311 of the Code of Criminal Procedure.
The decision is expected to trigger renewed scrutiny of Turkey’s handling of terrorism prosecutions, particularly those targeting followers of the Gülen movement. Human rights advocates say the ruling confirms that the government used digital tools and intelligence data to justify mass detentions and convictions without proving individual criminal conduct.
The case adds to a growing body of ECtHR rulings that call into question the legal foundations of mass detentions and prosecutions carried out in Turkey since the coup attempt.
Tens of thousands of people, including civil servants, teachers, judges, journalists and businesspeople, were detained or dismissed in the post-coup purge for alleged ties to the Gülen movement.
The Turkish government designates the group as a terrorist organization, though it was a legally operating religious and social network in Turkey prior to its designation as such in May 2016, two months before the failed coup, and maintains it had no role in the putsch or involvement in any terrorist activity.
Since 2016, the Turkish government has waged a relentless campaign against the Gülen movement, purging tens of thousands of civil servants, journalists, academics and business owners.
According to data from the police’s counterterrorism department, as reported by the Anadolu news agency last week, a total of 390,354 people have been detained on charges broadly categorized under terrorism or coup-related offenses since the coup attempt. Of these, 113,837 have been arrested.
Human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have repeatedly criticized the post-coup crackdown for undermining due process, suppressing dissent and targeting a religious group without credible evidence of wrongdoing. Despite these warnings, the purges and prosecutions continue nearly a decade later.
