Naim Eminoğlu, a lawyer and executive of the Progressive Lawyers Association (ÇHD), was arrested on Thursday in İstanbul over alleged links to the faith-based Gülen movement, Turkish media reported.
After he was taken into custody on Wednesday on accusations of Gülen ties, the ÇHD said Eminoğlu’s detention was politically motivated, with the real target being his legal work, including representing victims in a ski resort fire case, families of those killed in earthquake-related negligence trials and prisoners on hunger strike protesting Turkey’s high-security “pit-type” prisons.
Eminoğlu appeared at a joint press conference on December 7 urging lawmakers to amend Turkey’s 11th Judicial Package to prevent those responsible for deaths in the February 6, 2023, earthquakes from benefiting from proposed sentence reductions. He had sharply criticized the bill at the event, saying, “In Turkey today, if you receive even a single day of imprisonment for insulting the president, you are not pardoned, but when you cause the death of 50,000 people, you benefit from sentence reductions. This is the kind of law we are dealing with.”
The People’s Law Office (HHB) where Eminoğlu was detained also rejected the allegations of Gülen links and said the operation aims to undermine and ultimately eliminate the practice of “revolutionary lawyering.”
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.
Following Eminoğlu’s detention, 11 international lawyers organizations issued a joint statement describing his alleged ties to the Gülen movement as “unfounded, inconsistent, and incompatible with his long-standing record of work for people’s rights and freedoms.” They expressed concern that his arrest may be linked to his legitimate professional activities defending earthquake victims, calling for his immediate release and the lifting of secrecy orders and restrictions on lawyer access.
Lawyers and bar associations in Turkey have increasingly faced investigations and prosecutions for their work, raising concerns over the erosion of legal independence. The government has been accused of criminalizing legal defense to intimidate lawyers representing clients associated with dissident groups.
In recent months, the president and 10 board members of the İstanbul Bar Association were targeted in an investigation after calling for an inquiry into the death of two Kurdish journalists reportedly killed in a Turkish drone strike in Syria. Meanwhile, Lawyer Mehmet Pehlivan, representing İstanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s most significant political rival, was arrested on charges of membership in a criminal organization.
