A former Turkish teacher convicted of alleged links to the Gülen movement is facing a serious health crisis in prison, but authorities have not transferred him to a hospital despite worsening symptoms, an opposition lawmaker has said.
According to the TR724 news website, Emre Turan has had ulcerative colitis, a chronic inflammatory bowel disease, since 2010 and faces an elevated risk of cancer. His wife, Buket Turan, said he has been suffering heavy bleeding and that his condition has worsened in recent weeks, but prison authorities have not transferred him to a hospital for further tests or treatment.
Opposition lawmaker Ömer Faruk Gergerlioglu of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party) urged officials to act, warning that delays could have fatal consequences.
Buket Turan said her husband was taken from Afyon No. 2 T-Type prison to Afyon Hospital on January 9 to see a gastroenterologist. She said the doctor told him to stop taking a drug he had been using for years because of potential serious side effects but that he was returned to prison without being given an alternate medication or treatment plan.
She said prison officials later declined to arrange another hospital referral, citing a note from the doctor that said he should return for a checkup in six months.
Buket Turan said her husband later consulted his own gastroenterologist, who questioned why no alternative treatment was provided after the medication was stopped. She also said no tests were conducted during the hospital visit, despite what she described as prior medical recommendations for regular monitoring.
Turan worked as a teacher in Denizli in western Turkey. He was jailed in 2020 pending appeal after being sentenced to nearly seven years in prison over alleged links to the Gülen movement, but was released about three months later due to health concerns. He was re-arrested in 2023 as authorities accused him of trying to flee the country. Turkey’s top appeals court later upheld his conviction.
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 strongly denies involvement in the coup attempt or any terrorist activity.
Turan’s conviction was based on his work at a now-closed private tutoring center, an account at the defunct Gülen-linked Bank Asya and alleged use of the encrypted messaging application ByLock, which was available on Apple’s App Store and Google Play.
Since the coup attempt in 2016, the Turkish government has accepted such activities as having an account at now-shuttered Bank Asya, one of Turkey’s largest commercial banks at the time; using the ByLock messaging application; and subscribing to the now-shut-down Zaman daily or other publications affiliated with members of the movement as benchmarks for identifying and arresting alleged followers of the Gülen movement on charges of membership in a terrorist organization.
Turkish authorities have considered ByLock to be a secret tool of communication among supporters of the Gülen movement since the coup attempt on July 15, 2016, despite a lack of evidence that ByLock messages were related to the abortive putsch.
Although the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has in many cases made clear that use of the ByLock messaging app does not constitute a criminal offense, detentions and arrests of individuals continue in Turkey for their alleged use of the ByLock application.
