This week the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) delivered a landmark judgment in the case of prominent Turkish human rights defender, Osman Kavala.
It denounced the bad faith of Turkey’s authorities, and ruled that Kavala has been unlawfully imprisoned for almost nine years based on a politically motivated trial.
Consequently, the court stated that his criminal conviction must be considered null and void and ordered his immediate release.
Unfortunately, this may not happen.
Turkey has already defied two previous binding rulings from the court in his case.
And despite pressure from governments, international institutions and campaigners – Amnesty International declared Kavala and his six co-defendants prisoners of conscience in 2022 – Turkish authorities have continued to flagrantly obstruct justice, with very little consequence.
The case is emblematic of how the judiciary has been weaponised in the crackdown against real and perceived dissent.
In what became known as the ‘Gezi Park trial’, Kavala was detained in 2017.
Along with his co-defendants, he was first acquitted in February 2020. Soon after, the judges who acquitted them faced disciplinary proceedings.
Instead of being released, Kavala then faced new charges based on the same ‘evidence’. Despite the failure of prosecuting authorities to provide substance to the baseless charges laid against him, in April 2022 he was sentenced to aggravated life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
At that point he had already been imprisoned for four-and-a-half years.
Languishing in Erdogan’s jails
Others facing politically motivated prosecutions are similarly languishing in prison.
Selahattin Demirtaş and Figen Yüksekdağ, former leaders of the People’s Democratic Party, are unlawfully deprived of their liberty despite ECtHR rulings ordering their immediate release.
Taner Kılıç, Amnesty Turkey’s honorary chair, was tried alongside İdil Eser, the organisation’s former Turkey director and nine other human rights defenders, known as the Istanbul 10, on baseless allegations of “membership of a terrorist organisation”.
Every single one was eventually acquitted but the chilling effect of their treatment is felt to this day.
Their treatment is part of a wider ongoing authoritarian crackdown which has seen concerted efforts to crush political opposition, silence dissent, and severely limit the space for civil society to act.
Decade since attemped coup
Last month, as Turkey marked the 10th anniversary of the attempted coup, it was hard not to reflect on how the decade-long, roll back of rights has deeply impacted Turkish society, hollowing out key institutions, shutting down critical voices and spreading fear.
While Turkey’s state of emergency introduced in the wake of the coup attempt lasted two years, its lifting merely ushered in a new phase of repressive measures by the authorities in which many emergency provisions were integrated into ordinary law.
A raft of repressive legislation has targeted civil society, with the independence of the judiciary compromised, domestic courts weaponized and binding international court decisions ignored, treaties abandoned and standards trampled on.
As the mass arrests of hundreds of people in the days before last month’s Nato summit and the four-month long first hearing in the trial of Istanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, and 413 other defendants, demonstrate, the assault on rights is unrelenting.
İmamoğlu faces a possible mind-boggling 2,352 years in prison if found guilty.
The rights to freedom of peaceful assembly, association and expression have come under sustained attack through arbitrary restrictions and blanket bans, while law enforcement officials subject peaceful protesters to unlawful force, ill-treatment, and even alleged torture.
For two years after the coup attempt, Turkey gained the ignominious title of the world’s biggest jailer of journalists.
In March 2025, 45 members of Saturday Mothers/People – relatives of victims of enforced disappearances in the 1980s and 1990s – were acquitted in a criminal case brought against them for their 700th peaceful vigil in 2018.
Restrictions on the group’s weekly vigils in Istanbul continue despite binding Constitutional Court rulings for them to be lifted.
The Nato summit in Ankara on 7-8 July was accompanied by a 13-day blanket ban on protests.
More than 200 people including lawyers, academics and activists, were held in pretrial detention ahead of the summit. In March 2025, hundreds of young people were detained and criminalised for protesting the detention and subsequent remand in pretrial detention of Istanbul mayor and opposition presidential candidate İmamoğlu.
More than 10 years after the failed coup attempt and more than 13 years since the Gezi Park protests, the distance that Turkey has travelled along the authoritarian path is starkly clear.
This direction is reversible. But the Turkish authorities have made clear that they do not intend to shift their path.
As a result, the European Convention system for human rights protection now faces a defining test.
Council of Europe inaction
Despite the previous two ECtHR rulings, the Council of Europe has yet to take meaningful action to ensure Turkey’s compliance with the court’s judgments by releasing Osman Kavala. If Turkey fails to implement the court’s third judgment the Council of Europe’s very purpose of upholding human rights would be dangerously undermined.
The committee of ministers (the Council of Europe’s decision-making body), charged with supervising execution and compliance with ECtHR judgments, has adopted various decisions calling for Kavala’s immediate release.
In the face of such serious and continuous lack of compliance, the Council of Europe, including its parliamentary assembly and secretary general, need to take every necessary measure and use all appropriate tools available to secure the implementation of these judgments to ensure that Kavala and others who are detained for politically motivated reasons are finally released from prison.
The Council of Europe and its member states must recognise and address the implications of Turkey’s failure to implement these judgments, which threatens to seriously undermine the convention system.
Kavala’s case is a litmus test for the European system of human rights protection. Populations and their governments and institutions must resist and help reverse the deteriorating rights situation in Turkey.
