The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has ruled that Turkey violated the privacy rights of a former judge imprisoned over alleged links to the faith-based Gülen movement by monitoring his meetings with his lawyer and storing electronic copies of his private correspondence.
In a judgment delivered Tuesday, the Strasbourg-based court found two violations of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which protects the right to respect for private and family life and correspondence. The case concerns Salih Benli, a former judge in Diyarbakır.
Benli was detained on July 21, 2016, six days after a coup attempt, on accusations of membership in a terrorist organization over his alleged links to the Gülen movement. He was convicted on March 23, 2018, and released pending appeal the same day after spending about 20 months in detention.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has targeted the faith-based Gülen movement, inspired by Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen, who died in 2024, since corruption investigations in December 2013 implicated Erdoğan 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 attempted coup or any terrorist activity.
All 15 meetings Benli had with his lawyer between September 2016 and March 2018 were monitored and took place in the presence of a prison guard under measures introduced during a state of emergency that followed the 2016 abortive putsch.
The ECtHR found that the emergency decree gave prosecutors broad discretion to restrict detainees’ communication with their lawyers without setting limits or safeguards against arbitrary interference. The court said the lack of such safeguards could not be justified by the state of emergency following the 2016 coup attempt.
The court relied on its 2023 judgment in Canavcı and Others v. Türkiye, which concerned the same restrictions on lawyer-client communication, saying it found no reason to depart from its earlier findings.
The ECtHR also found a violation over the scanning and storage of Benli’s private correspondence on the National Judicial Network System (UYAP), relying on its 2022 judgment in Nuh Uzun and Others v. Turkey. In that case, the court found that the directives underlying the practice had not been communicated to prisoners and therefore failed to meet the ECHR’s “quality of law” requirement or provide adequate protection against arbitrary interference.
The judgment was delivered unanimously by a three-judge committee, which handles cases where the legal issues is already covered by the court’s well-established case law. Committee judgments are final when issued and cannot be referred to the court’s Grand Chamber.
The court ordered Turkey to pay Benli 2,000 euros in non-pecuniary damages and 500 euros 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.
