Three rights groups told the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) ahead of a Wednesday hearing that imprisoned Turkish philanthropist Osman Kavala’s case shows how the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has brought Turkey’s judiciary under political control, Turkish Minute reported.
The Grand Chamber, the top panel of the Strasbourg-based court, is scheduled to hear Kavala’s case at 9:15 a.m. local time tomorrow.
In a third-party intervention submitted by the Turkey Human Rights Litigation Support Project, Human Rights Watch and the International Commission of Jurists, the groups argue that Kavala’s continued imprisonment is tied to the erosion of judicial independence in Turkey and what they describe as Ankara’s persistent refusal to carry out binding rulings from the European court.
The filing says Kavala’s prosecution is part of a broader pattern in politically sensitive cases in which Turkish authorities bypass or delay implementation of court judgments while keeping perceived dissidents behind bars.
Kavala, who has been in custody since October 2017, was sentenced in April 2022 to aggravated life imprisonment on a charge of attempting to overthrow the government over his alleged role in the 2013 Gezi Park protests, a nationwide wave of anti-government demonstrations that began as a small protest against an urban redevelopment plan in central İstanbul. His conviction became final in September 2023 despite a 2019 ruling from the European court finding that his detention was arbitrary and politically motivated, and a 2022 Grand Chamber judgment in infringement proceedings that found Turkey had failed to comply with that ruling.
The intervention says the problem lies in changes to the structure of Turkey’s judicial system, especially after a 2017 constitutional referendum that expanded presidential power.
According to the filing, those changes reshaped the Council of Judges and Prosecutors, the body that oversees appointments, promotions, transfers and discipline for judges and prosecutors, in ways that left it open to control by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its far-right ally, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP).
The groups say that before the overhaul, members of the judiciary elected a substantial share of the council. After the changes, none are elected by judges themselves, while the president and parliament gained decisive influence over who sits on the body.
The filing goes further, arguing that the system now works in a cycle that reinforces political control. It says the government influences who becomes a judge or prosecutor, that some of those figures then move into top judicial posts and that the Council of Judges and Prosecutors in turn exercises broad power over the careers of other judges and prosecutors.
The intervention also points to the mass dismissal of thousands of judges and prosecutors after a failed coup in 2016 and their replacement through recruitment procedures that, it says, were not transparent and were dominated by the executive branch.
A major part of the submission asks the European Court to reconsider whether Turkey’s Constitutional Court can still be treated as an effective domestic remedy in politically sensitive cases. Under the European Convention on Human Rights, applicants normally must first exhaust effective domestic remedies before turning to Strasbourg. But the rights groups argue that Turkey’s Constitutional Court no longer meets that standard in cases involving dissidents because most of its members are appointed directly or indirectly through processes shaped by the presidency and ruling bloc, and because politically charged applications often face long delays or open non-compliance by lower courts.
To support that argument, the filing cites other high-profile cases that have exposed clashes within Turkey’s judicial system.
Among them is the case of Can Atalay, a jailed opposition lawmaker and co-defendant in the Gezi trial, whose release was ordered by the Constitutional Court but blocked by Turkey’s top appeals court for criminal cases. The intervention says such episodes show that even when the Constitutional Court rules in favor of a rights claimant, its decisions can be ignored in cases touching the government’s political interests.
The groups also say Kavala’s case is part of a larger pattern of non-compliance with Strasbourg rulings. Their filing says Turkey still has 141 leading European court judgments and 315 repetitive cases awaiting implementation, making it the worst performer among the 46 member states of the Council of Europe, the continent’s main human rights body.
The intervention puts Kavala’s case in the same frame as those of former co-chairs of Turkey’s main pro-Kurdish party Selahattin Demirtaş and Figen Yüksekdağ, whose continued detention has also drawn condemnation from the European court and the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers.
The case now before the Grand Chamber is Kavala’s second application to the Strasbourg court. It concerns his detention and conviction after the 2019 judgment. The court gave the case priority before it was later referred to the Grand Chamber.
The hearing on Wednesday will also include an intervention by Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights Michael O’Flaherty.
At issue is whether Europe’s top human rights court will address not only the facts of Kavala’s continued imprisonment but also the broader claim that Turkey’s judicial institutions have been reshaped to serve the priorities of the ruling party. The central point of the intervention is that Kavala’s case is not an isolated miscarriage of justice but evidence of a court system that rights groups say no longer acts independently in cases involving government critics.
