Turkey’s Constitutional Court has ruled that authorities violated their obligation to investigate credible allegations of torture made by Zabit Kişi, a former teacher convicted over links to the Gülen movement, following his reported abduction from Kazakhstan and incommunicado detention.
The court ordered that Kişi be paid 190,000 Turkish lira (about $4,860) in compensation and that prosecutors reopen the investigation, addressing the key failures previously identified.
Kişi was abducted on September 30, 2017, at Almaty International Airport in Kazakhstan by men he said identified themselves as agents of Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization (MİT). He was beaten and forced onto an unmarked plane before being transported to Turkey.
Upon arrival, he was held in a windowless, three-square-meter container without access to legal counsel, family or the outside world. He remained there for 108 days, during which time he says he was tortured, his ribs fractured by kicks, his body subjected to electric shocks and his toes crushed. He also alleged a sexual assault attempt and psychological threats, including harm to his family.
Kişi re-emerged in public in January 2018 when he was reportedly blindfolded and left in a parking garage at an Ankara courthouse. He was immediately taken into custody by counterterrorism police.
In stark contrast to his claims, an official police report dated the same day asserts that Kişi voluntarily surrendered to authorities, seeking leniency under Turkey’s repentance law. The Constitutional Court noted that this contradiction was never reconciled and that the prosecutor’s office failed to investigate how Kişi arrived at the courthouse or who transported him.
Despite the severity of the allegations, the Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office closed the investigation in November 2020, nearly three-and-a-half years later, citing a lack of evidence. The decision was made without obtaining formal statements from Kişi or the police officers involved.
The court found this inadequate. “No meaningful effort was made to verify the plausibility of the applicant’s claims,” the ruling stated, citing uncollected evidence including flight records, surveillance footage and forensic evaluations.
While initial police-supervised medical exams showed no injuries, Kişi later obtained hospital reports noting fractured ribs and nerve compression that required surgery. These were not examined by independent experts, the court found, nor were they considered in light of the allegations.
The court emphasized that trauma, fear and continued threats could prevent victims from fully disclosing abuse during early examinations. “In such cases,” the ruling said, “later medical findings must be given due weight and context.”
The court ordered the case file returned to the Ankara prosecutor’s office for a renewed investigation, instructing that omissions be corrected and the matter pursued with the seriousness required by domestic and international human rights standards.
Kişi was sentenced in 2019 to 13-and-a-half years in prison over alleged links to the Gülen movement.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been targeting followers of the Gülen movement, inspired by the late Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen since the corruption investigations of 2013, which implicated then-prime minister Erdoğan, 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.
Since the coup attempt in July 2016 the Erdoğan government has employed extra-legal methods to secure the return of its critics after its official extradition requests have been denied. The government’s campaign has mostly relied on renditions, in which the government and its intelligence agency MİT persuade the relevant states to hand over individuals without due process. The victims have been the subjects of a number of human rights violations including arbitrary arrests, house raids, torture and ill-treatment during these operations. A detailed account of the Erdoğan government’s transnational repression can be found in a report by the Stockholm Center for Freedom titled “Turkey’s Transnational Repression: Abduction, Rendition and Forcible Return of Erdoğan Critics.”
In several of these cases, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD) concluded that the arrest, detention and forced transfer to Turkey of Turkish nationals were arbitrary and in violation of international human rights norms and standards.
