Voters Rights Violated; Government Critics Prosecuted
Human Rights Watch, January 16, 2025
(Istanbul) – Türkiye’s rising regional influence shouldn’t lead international partners to ignore its democratic backsliding at home, Human Rights Watch said today in its World Report 2025.
For the 546-page world report, in its 35th edition, Human Rights Watch reviewed human rights practices in more than 100 countries. In much of the world, Executive Director Tirana Hassan writes in her introductory essay, governments cracked down and wrongfully arrested and imprisoned political opponents, activists, and journalists. Armed groups and government forces unlawfully killed civilians, drove many from their homes, and blocked access to humanitarian aid. In many of the more than 70 national elections in 2024, authoritarian leaders gained ground with their discriminatory rhetoric and policies.
“International partners shouldn’t overlook Türkiye’s repressive human rights record at home as Erdoğan’s regional influence has risen with the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad in Syria,” said Hugh Williamson, Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “The Turkish government needs to stop initiating bogus criminal proceedings and detention orders against its critics, to stop removing elected local politicians, and to carry out the binding judgments of the European Court of Human Rights.”
In 2024, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government replaced elected opposition mayors with Ankara appointees and detained and punished Kurdish political activists, journalists, and people with alleged links to the Fethullah Gülen movement, which the government blames for the 2016 attempted coup. Türkiye failed to curb grave human rights abuses by its Syrian National Army (SNA) proxies in areas of northern Syria under its effective control.
- The human rights defender Osman Kavala has been in prison for over seven years and Selahattin Demirtaş and Figen Yüksekdağ, the former cochairs of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), for over eight years, in defiance of binding European Court of Human Rights judgments ordering their release.
- The government put forward a vaguely worded espionage bill criticized by human rights groups and journalists for its potential to criminalize legitimate work by civil society groups and the media, though it ultimately withdrew the bill.
- The government removed five Kurdish mayors from the opposition Peoples’ Democracy and Equality Party (DEM) and two Kurdish mayors from the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) elected in the March local elections, detaining the mayor of Istanbul’s Esenyurt district.
- The Turkish authorities failed to curb abuses by their Syrian National Army proxies in the territories of northern Syria where Türkiye exercises effective control. Kurds and Arabs in those areas have been subjected to arbitrary arrest, enforced disappearance, torture and ill-treatment, sexual violence, and unfair military trials, with thousands forcibly displaced, their property and land seized.
The Turkish government should stop arresting and prosecuting its critics, free all those being held for their political views, and adhere to the European Court of Human Rights judgments in those cases it has long defied.