Turkey’s justice ministry is deploying artificial intelligence to scrutinize legal documents for associations with groups designated as terrorists by Ankara, a practice that experts fear will reinforce the judiciary’s documented pattern of serious rights violations, Turkish Minute reported.
The ministry refers to this initiative as the Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office Organization Prediction Project. Created by the ministry’s Directorate General of Information Technology, the software analyzes data in Turkey’s National Judiciary Informatics System (UYAP) and evaluates it against records of groups designated by Turkey as terrorists.
Lawyer Hatice Yıldız questioned the use of the system in a post on X on Thursday.
“A project to predict the [terrorist] organization has been developed. The prosecutor’s office will upload the information in the investigation file and AI will identify the organization, supposedly preventing human error,” Yıldız wrote.
“Does the prosecutor not understand the files they read? What is this, some kind of [terrorist] affiliation detector?” she added.
Justice Ministry Information Technology Director General Servet Gül presented the system as a tool for correcting data entry errors in files held by public prosecutor’s offices in April 2025. He said it automatically matched newly entered information with existing terrorist organization records.
Gül said the purpose was to improve judicial statistics, reports requested by international monitors such as the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and data management in prosecution files.
The ministry’s June 2026 description says the system analyzes the contents of a case file, predicts a possible organization link and assists judges and prosecutors in their decision making.
Seven of the ministry’s nine AI projects were being used nationwide by April 2025, Gül told parliament. The ministry’s June 2026 announcement said the organization prediction tool was available to all judges and prosecutors.
Ali Yıldız, a human rights lawyer based in Belgium, warned that the system could reproduce legal assumptions embedded in past terrorism investigations and court rulings.
“Machine-learning systems derive their predictions from historical data,” Yıldız told Turkish Minute.
“Where that data reflects legal interpretations that the European Court of Human Rights [ECtHR] has already held to be incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights, the resulting model risks perpetuating — and potentially reinforcing — those very interpretations,” Yıldız said.
The ECtHR Grand Chamber ruled in the case of Yüksel Yalçınkaya that Turkish courts had created an almost automatic presumption of guilt by treating the use of the ByLock messaging application as proof of terrorist organization membership. In its May 2026 judgment in the case of Şaban Yasak, the court found that Turkish courts had failed to assess through concrete evidence whether the defendant knew of the organization’s aims and intended to take part in them.
“A system trained on years of Turkish terrorism investigations and prosecutions, for example, may replicate the same generalized indicators and presumptions of organizational membership that the Grand Chamber condemned in Yalçınkaya and Yasak while cloaking those flawed assumptions in the appearance of objective, algorithmic neutrality,” Yıldız said.
The Council of Europe’s European Commission for the Efficiency of Justice says AI used in judicial systems should respect fundamental rights, prevent discrimination, use secure and verified data, permit outside audits and remain under the control of informed users. It also calls for data processing methods to be accessible and understandable.
“The ministry has disclosed virtually no information about the system’s training data, performance metrics, false-positive rate, or the safeguards implemented to detect and mitigate bias. It has likewise failed to explain whether the model generates reasons for its predictions, whether those predictions are retained for independent audit, or whether defendants will be informed if an AI-generated assessment influenced the processing or evaluation of their case,” lawyer Yıldız stated.
The concerns about the system come against the backdrop of a judiciary reshaped under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, particularly since a 2013 corruption investigation targeted senior members of his government. Erdoğan accused the prosecutors, judges and police involved in the investigation of acting on behalf of the Gülen movement, a faith-based group critical of his government.
Until 2016 Erdoğan sought to reshape the judiciary by appointing loyalists to key positions. Following a coup attempt in July 2016, the government launched an extensive crackdown, largely targeting the president’s opponents.
More than 4,000 judges and prosecutors were disbarred in the aftermath of the coup attempt over alleged ties to the Gülen movement, which the government accuses of orchestrating the abortive putsch. The movement denies any involvement.
The mass purge is widely believed to have created a chilling effect across Turkey’s judiciary, pressuring remaining members to align with government priorities and to pursue politically motivated investigations and prosecutions.
