Date posted: December 28, 2025

The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) ruled Tuesday that Turkey violated the rights of 2,420 people convicted of terrorism due to their alleged ties to the faith-based Gülen movement, finding that the judiciary failed to ensure fair trials and imposed criminal penalties without a legal basis.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been targeting followers of the Gülen movement, inspired by the late Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen, since corruption investigations revealed in 2013 implicated then-prime minister Erdoğan as well as some of 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.

The ruling marks the first group of follow-up decisions after the court’s 2023 “pilot judgment,” a decision that aims to address not only the individual case before the court, but also similar cases that are pending or may arise in the future, in the case of Yüksel Yalçınkaya.

The ECtHR ruled in the Yalçınkaya case that the conviction of a teacher, based on his use of the ByLock messaging app, affiliation with a union and account at Bank Asya, violated his rights to a fair trial, freedom of association and protection from retroactive criminal charges. The judgment has broad implications as it could affect thousands of similar cases in Turkey.

In three committee judgments, the Strasbourg-based court found violations of Article 7 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which bars punishment without law, and of Article 6 Section 1, which guarantees the right to a fair trial. The cases are Bozyokuş and Others v. Türkiye with 132 applicants, Karslı and Others v. Türkiye with 1,436 applicants and Seyhan and Others v. Türkiye with 852 applicants.

The court said the 2,420 applications are part of thousands of similar cases pending in Strasbourg after the court’s Grand Chamber judgment in Yüksel Yalçınkaya v. Türkiye in 2023 and its chamber ruling in Demirhan and Others v. Türkiye in July 2025.

In Tuesday’s rulings the ECtHR said Turkish courts had adopted a categorical approach that effectively equated ByLock use with terrorism membership, including by holding that anyone who used the application could, in principle, be convicted on that basis alone. The court said that approach breached safeguards against arbitrary prosecution, conviction and punishment and/or violated fair trial rights.

According to the court, the applicants were charged after the coup attempt with membership in an armed terrorist organization under Article 314, Section 2 of the Turkish Penal Code and were convicted based “decisively” on alleged ByLock use. It said the Turkish Constitutional Court summarily dismissed the individual applications lodged against those convictions.

The decisions were issued by a committee of three judges: Jovan Ilievski of North Macedonia, Péter Paczolay of Hungary and Juha Lavapuro of Finland.

The court said it did not rule out that other evidence might exist in individual case files, but it found that establishing ByLock use had served on its own as conclusive proof of all elements of the crime of terrorist membership as applied in Turkey.

The Strasbourg court declined to award compensation, saying the finding of a violation was sufficient “just satisfaction” for any damage. It said the applicants could seek the reopening of domestic proceedings under Turkish law and said it was not justified to award costs and expenses in follow-up applications of this type.

The judgments will be sent to the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers, the body that supervises whether governments carry out European Court of Human Rights rulings.

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Lawyers following the cases said the committee and other Council of Europe officials should press Ankara to change the court practice that the Strasbourg judges have already labeled as a systemic problem.

Turkey continues to defy the ECtHR judgments in landmark cases such as Yalçınkaya, philanthropist Osman Kavala and Kurdish politician Selahattin Demirtaş.

President Erdoğan and Justice Minister Yılmaz Tunç maintain that Turkey’s compliance rate with Strasbourg court rulings is above 90 percent, but critics including independent lawmaker Mustafa Yeneroğlu argue that the key measure is whether Turkey implements “leading cases” that require structural change.

Despite a seemingly high overall compliance rate of around 90 percent, Turkey still has 448 unimplemented judgments, while Belgium, which has a similar rate, has only 25.

Turkey is the leading country in the number of cases pending before the ECtHR, with 21,800 applications awaiting judgment, representing 34.7 percent of the total, according to recent court data.

According to the latest figures from the Justice Ministry, more than 126,000 people have been convicted for alleged links to the Gülen movement since 2016, with 11,085 still in prison. Legal proceedings are ongoing for over 24,000 individuals, while another 58,000 remain under investigation nearly a decade later.

In addition to the thousands who were jailed, scores of other Gülen movement followers had to flee Turkey to avoid the government crackdown.