Turkiye¶
The Turkish cases reveal how political contests can be settled through procedures built for something else. Criminal law, university administration and the law of associations each carry a power to classify, annul or remove, and each can be pointed at a rival without a word of it being changed. Because each step passes through a court or a board, the outcome arrives looking like the application of a rule, and none of those bodies is asked why the rule was applied to this person. The safeguards sit inside the same chain: the courts that review a reading belong to the system that made it, and an outside judgment can be acknowledged while the result stays in place. Each part can be defended as procedure; the political choice that links them is made elsewhere and rarely appears in the file.
The clerk’s briefs¶
From the clerks, for the Patrician’s eyes
Read these, a tidy purge method is in place. Opposition voters find that a court can decide who leads the party they voted for, and the members who walked out must build a new one, which can be challenged in the same way as the old. Prosecutors and judges can see which decisions are followed by promotion. Applicants who win in Strasbourg receive a declaration and, so far, little else, and the thousands still waiting learn from that how much a win is worth. Other parties may start holding their congresses with lawyers in the room. A government later formed by today’s opposition would inherit courts used to settling political contests, and might find them convenient. A Council of State ruling for Imamoglu, a Court of Cassation reversal on the congress, or Council of Europe pressure with consequences attached could slow this; none looks close.
October 2026: The same records¶
On 14 October 2026 the justice minister, Akin Gurlek, announced four operations against FETO and ISIS in Izmir, Eskisehir, Agri and Aydin, in which 33 of 35 suspects were detained. In one of them, suspects were identified after examination of ByLock messages, Bank Asya and HTS (telephone traffic) records. The clerks note that the records Strasbourg had found wanting a fortnight earlier were the ones cited, which suggests the judgment was read, and filed.
September 2026: The same answer twice¶
On 29 September 2026 the European Court of Human Rights, in three unanimous judgments, found violations for 947 applicants convicted after the attempted coup: of the right to a fair trial for 591 applicants in Unal and Others and 345 in Parun and Others, and of no punishment without law for 11 in Korkmaz and Others. It held that the finding of a violation was sufficient compensation for any non-pecuniary damage. Yuksel Yalcinkaya, whose case set the pattern, had already been retried: on 12 September 2024 the Kayseri 2nd Heavy Penal Court gave the same decision, on the grounds that its earlier ruling contained nothing unlawful. The clerks note that Strasbourg can count the convictions, and the courts that made them can decline to recount.
May 2026: Absolute nullity¶
On 21 May 2026 the 36th Civil Chamber of the Ankara Regional Court of Appeal declared void, for “mutlak butlan” (absolute nullity), the CHP’s 38th Ordinary Congress of November 2023 and the extraordinary congress held after it. The ruling removed the party’s chair, Ozgur Ozel, and opened the way for his predecessor, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, to return to office; the file reached the Court of Cassation in July. On 24 July Ozel resigned from the CHP and signed the founding papers of the YENI Parti, and 91 members of parliament left with him. In September the party’s court-appointed leadership under Kilicdaroglu withdrew its own appeal, saying it wanted to complete a congress quickly. Ozel’s appeal and one other remain, so the ruling is not yet final. The clerks note that a court need not ban the main opposition party; it can hand the name to the man the delegates voted out, and leave the members to find another.
March 2026: The trial at Silivri¶
On 11 February 2026 Akin Gurlek, Istanbul’s chief public prosecutor, who had ordered numerous investigations into CHP politicians including Ekrem Imamoglu, was appointed Minister of Justice. On 9 March Imamoglu’s trial opened in the courthouse on the Marmara Prison campus at Silivri, with 406 co-defendants, 107 of them held in pretrial detention. The indictment runs to nearly 3,900 pages and, if he is convicted, he could face a combined sentence of up to 2,430 years. The clerks note that the prosecutor who opened the investigations was promoted before the trial began, which tells the next prosecutor something about careers.
September 2025: A trustee for Istanbul¶
On 2 September 2025 the Istanbul 45th Civil Court of First Instance, in an interim decision, annulled all decisions of the CHP’s Istanbul provincial congress of 8 October 2023, removed the provincial chair, Ozgur Celik, and his executive, and appointed a temporary management of Gursel Tekin and four others. The same day the Istanbul 72nd Criminal Court of First Instance accepted an indictment against Celik and nine other officials, seeking one to three years in prison under the Political Parties Law on allegations that delegates had been paid, or promised jobs for relatives in CHP municipalities. On 17 September 2026 the same court, finding that circumstances had changed, lifted all interim measures, ending the trusteeship, and adjourned the case to 30 April 2027. The clerks note that the court took a year to find that circumstances had changed, by which time the party had changed with them.
March 2025: The degree that never was¶
On 18 March 2025 Istanbul University’s executive board annulled the diplomas of Ekrem Imamoglu, the mayor of Istanbul, and 28 others, on grounds of “nullity” and “clear error” in transfers between universities made in 1990. The next day police detained him, days before his party’s presidential primary. The annulment, if upheld, bars him from the presidential election. He had applied for the CHP presidential primary on 21 February 2025, and the Istanbul chief prosecutor wrote to the university on 24 February. The Istanbul 5th Administrative Court rejected his challenge on 23 January 2026 and the regional administrative court on 13 May 2026; his lawyers appealed to the Council of State on 17 June 2026. The clerks note that removing a rival from a ballot needed no decree and no court, only a university board and a file thirty-five years old.
September 2023: The app as evidence¶
The European Court of Human Rights, sitting as a Grand Chamber, ruled in Yuksel Yalcinkaya v. Türkiye that his conviction for membership of FETO/PDY violated his rights to a fair trial, to no punishment without law and to freedom of association. The conviction rested decisively on the courts’ inference from his use of the messaging app ByLock. The Court called the problems systemic and counted about 8,500 similar applications on its docket. The clerks observe that a list of users of an app was read as a list of members of an organisation, which is the archive turned into a weapon, carried out in full.