A Luxembourg court has overturned the rejection of an asylum application filed by a Turkish man linked to the Gülen movement, ruling that his father’s conviction and his own activities with the movement put him at risk of persecution if returned to Turkey.
The Luxembourg Administrative Court found that the Interior Ministry had wrongly rejected the man’s application and granted him refugee status and canceled an order requiring him to leave the country.
The ministry had rejected his application in November 2024, saying his father’s prosecution in Turkey did not establish a risk to him and that he had not shown that he was personally targeted by Turkish authorities. It also cited his legal departure from Turkey and his stay in Poland without seeking asylum.
The court rejected the ministry’s argument that the risk was diminished because the man had not faced persecution before leaving Turkey and did not appear on a 2023 Turkish government list of alleged Gülen movement affiliates abroad. It said his absence from the list did not rule out his being added later and that the list itself showed that Turkish authorities identify and target alleged movement members living abroad.
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 him 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 a coup attempt in July of the same year that he accused Gülen of orchestrating. The movement denies involvement in the coup attempt or any terrorist activity.
The man said he had ties to the Gülen movement from a young age. After leaving Turkey for Poland in 2021, he became involved with Gülen-affiliated organizations there and continued similar activities with a local organization after moving to Luxembourg in 2023.
The man’s father was convicted in Turkey of membership in a terrorist organization over his links to the Gülen movement and sentenced to prison. Turkey’s Supreme Court of Appeals upheld the conviction in June 2025. The man said his father was imprisoned despite serious health problems and that the family faced social exclusion as a result of the case.
The court found that his father’s conviction and imprisonment, his own longstanding links to the movement and his public activities with affiliated organizations in Europe established a real risk that he could face similar prosecution and imprisonment by Turkish authorities if returned.
The court concluded that the combined circumstances showed that his fear of persecution was well-founded, current and sufficiently serious to qualify for refugee status.
The ruling follows similar decisions in Germany and the Netherlands, where courts overturned asylum rejections involving Turkish nationals with alleged Gülen links, finding that the absence of ongoing criminal proceedings or the completion of a prison sentence did not necessarily rule out a risk of persecution upon return.
According to the latest figures from the Turkish justice ministry, more than 127,000 people have been convicted of alleged links to the movement since 2016, with 10,485 still in prison and legal proceedings ongoing against 83,404 individuals.
