A top European court on Tuesday ruled that Turkey had not given 239 opponents a fair trial when it jailed them over alleged ties to a failed 2016 coup simply because they used a phone app.
The detainees were accused of being followers of the late cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Ankara blamed for masterminding the coup.
They were convicted of being members of Gulen’s Hizmet movement.
Applicants to the European Court for Human Rights (ECHR) argued they had been convicted based solely on their “alleged use of an encrypted messaging application by the name of ‘ByLock’, which the domestic courts held was designed for the exclusive use” of the Hizmet movement.
The ECHR condemned on Tuesday “the domestic courts’ categorical approach to the use of ByLock”.
“Under that approach, anyone whose use of ByLock was established by the domestic courts could, in principle, be convicted on that sole basis of membership in an armed terrorist organisation,” the Strasbourg-based court said.
Gulen, a cleric who died in 2024, was once a close ally of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan before the two became bitter enemies.
He relocated to the United States in 1999 and never returned.
Ankara considers ByLock to be the preferred communication tool of those allegedly responsible for the failed coup in 2016, which left 250 people dead and was followed by mass arrests and purges on a scale unprecedented in Turkey’s modern history.
Authorities have detained more than 25,000 people accused of belonging to the Hizmet movement since then, some 9,000 of whom have been held in custody, according to the Istanbul prosecutor’s office.
The ECHR noted that its Grand Chamber, whose rulings are binding, had already condemned Turkey on the same grounds in a similar case in September 2023.
It noted “a systemic problem” affecting a large number of people that must be resolved at the national level.
Since the Grand Chamber’s 2023 judgment, “the court has already given notice to the respondent government of 5,000 similar applications, and thousands more are still accumulating on its docket,” the ECHR added.
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© Agence France-Presse
