Turkish human rights lawyer Taner Kılıç and refugee rights advocate Pırıl Erçoban have been named recipients of the German Pro Asyl Foundation’s 2026 Human Rights Award, the organization said in a statement on Tuesday.
Kılıç and Erçoban will share the award with Giorgos Tsarbopoulos, a former head of the United Nations refugee agency’s office in Greece. The three will accept the award at a ceremony in Frankfurt on September 12.
Pro Asyl said the recipients were being honored for directly supporting asylum seekers, exposing human rights violations and defending the rule of law, particularly at Europe’s external borders, in immigration detention and before government agencies and courts.
“Pırıl Erçoban, Taner Kılıç and Giorgos Tsarbopoulos show what refugee protection means in everyday life: not leaving people alone and making rights violations visible,” said Halima Gutale, chair of the Pro Asyl Foundation’s board of trustees.
Gutale said their work was particularly important at a time when Europe was making access to protection more difficult and increasingly shifting responsibility for asylum seekers to third countries.
Kılıç, a former chair of Amnesty International’s Turkey branch, was recognized for decades of work as a lawyer and human rights advocate. He is a founding member of both Amnesty International Turkey and the İzmir-based Association for Solidarity with Refugees (Mülteci-Der).
His work gained international attention after he was arrested in June 2017 on terrorism-related charges while serving as Amnesty International Turkey’s chair.
The case against Kılıç relied in part on an allegation that he had used ByLock, an encrypted messaging application Turkish officials regard as a communication tool used by supporters of the faith-based Gülen movement. Amnesty International said forensic examinations of his phone found no evidence that the application had ever been installed.
Kılıç spent more than 14 months in pretrial detention and was sentenced in 2020 to more than six years in prison on charges of membership in a terrorist organization.
The European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2022 that there had been no reasonable suspicion that Kılıç had committed an offense and that his detention was directly linked to his work as a human rights defender. The court found violations of his rights to liberty, security and freedom of expression.
Turkey’s Supreme Court of Appeals overturned his conviction later that year. After further proceedings, the court rejected the prosecution’s appeal against his acquittal in February 2025, ending an almost eight-year prosecution.
The Turkish government accuses the Gülen movement of orchestrating a failed coup in July 2016 and designates it as a terrorist organization. The movement denies involvement in the failed coup or any terrorist activity.
Erçoban, the coordinator of Mülteci-Der, was recognized for her work defending the rights of refugees and asylum seekers in Turkey.
For more than two decades she has counseled and assisted asylum seekers, documented rights violations and drawn attention to problems involving immigration detention and deportations. Her advocacy has also focused on Turkey’s asylum policies and European efforts to transfer responsibility for asylum seekers to Turkey.
Those concerns have gained renewed significance since most provisions of the European Union’s migration and asylum overhaul began to be applied on June 12. The measures include faster border procedures and broader use of detention and other restrictions.
Additional rules adopted in February expanded the circumstances in which EU countries may use the “safe third country” concept to reject asylum applications without examining their merits.
Pro Asyl has criticized the changes as weakening refugee protections and cited the 2016 EU-Turkey migration deal as an earlier example of European efforts to shift responsibility for asylum seekers beyond the bloc.
Tsarbopoulos, who headed the UN refugee agency’s representation in Greece from 2006 until the end of 2015, was honored for documenting poor detention conditions, pushbacks and the disappearance of asylum seekers in the Evros border region.
He also pressed for survivors’ accounts to be recorded promptly and for an independent investigation after a deadly shipwreck near the Greek island of Farmakonisi in 2014.
The Pro Asyl Foundation has presented its Human Rights Award annually since 2006 to people recognized for their commitment to human rights and refugee protection in Germany and Europe. The award comes with a total prize of €5,000 ($5,790) and a sculpture by artist Ariel Auslender, a professor at the Technical University of Darmstadt.
This article is republished from Turkish Minute.
