Good Things Don’t Happen by Themselves

Most of the news from Turkey is bad. An investigation against a journalist, a dismissal for an academic, detention for a mayor. Almost every morning the screen greets us with a similar headline. There is no point in softening this picture, pretending it is not there or saying “it’s not really that bad”. It is bad.

Yet within this spiral of wrongdoing, and in spite of it, there are also people trying to wrest back their rights. Lawyers who follow a case for years, journalists who knock on the door of a detained colleague, workers who march when they are not paid… Thank goodness they exist. If something resembling good is happening in the country, it is not happening by itself. It is happening because someone is pushing for it.

Rights Wrested from the Courts

Since 2012, violations of fundamental rights in Turkey can be taken to the Constitutional Court once ordinary remedies have been exhausted. This route, known as the individual application, has resulted in more than 84,000 findings of rights violations in thirteen years. Between 2018 and 2025 alone, the compensation the state was obliged to pay exceeded 445 million lira. Behind each of these figures lies the story of a person who was wronged, did not give up, wrote a petition and sought justice.

In recent weeks, concrete examples of this have come one after another. The journalist Alican Uludağ, arrested in February on the grounds of his social media posts, was released about three months later. In early June the journalist Yelis Ayaz was set free. In May the trade unionist Hakkı Demiral, arrested for standing by carpet workers who had not been paid, was released subject to judicial control measures. Over the past year, 54 journalists were acquitted in 39 trials. Of course, none of this is a favour from the state or the courts. Each is the result of the persistent struggle of their lawyers, families and colleagues.

The door to a struggle that bears fruit has also opened at the international level. In a judgment delivered on 5 May 2026, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights found that convictions for “membership of an organisation” had violated the principle that only the law can define a crime and prescribe a penalty. In the assessment of the Human Rights Association (İHD), this is a structural judgment that is not limited to the situation of a single person. The most fundamental rule of law is at work: you cannot punish a person unless it was clear in advance which conduct constitutes a crime. Such judgments are also closely followed in the EU’s assessments of Turkey.

It is good that every sign that the law has not been entirely shelved in Turkey finds an echo in international public opinion. I hope these responses help to redress more injustices.

Along the same lines, last January the Constitutional Court removed the distinction that stood in the way of the right to compensation for public servants who had been dismissed by emergency decree and later reinstated. In the cases of hundreds of thousands of people condemned for years to “civil death”, a door has opened, however belatedly.

These rulings did not come about by themselves, of course. A court ruling may be only a few pages on paper, but behind those pages lie years of effort.

Lawyers in Turkey who practise their profession properly stand at the centre of this effort. Some received threats, some were arrested, some ended up abroad. The rest still wait every morning in the same courthouse corridors, files under their arms. Dozens of petitions, thousands of pages, cases taken to Europe.

From Algeria to South Africa, from Poland to South Korea, we know that periods of lawlessness sooner or later meet a day of reckoning. That reckoning does not happen by itself; it comes when persistence bears fruit.

These are unassuming acts of solidarity that rarely make headlines. Nobody expects a medal. But knowing that someone will knock on your door when you are detained or arrested breaks, at least a little, the deterrent effect of that repression. Knowing you are not alone is the strongest reason not to fall silent.

Those Expected to Fall Silent Who Did Not

Then there are those whom the authorities want to silence directly. Those who keep reporting in an environment where most of the traditional media is concentrated in a single hand and journalists are arrested for their posts. Many of them may be abroad. But gradually they are now also inside the country.

The price is heavy, sometimes absurdly arbitrary. At the end of April, the social media account of the newspaper Cumhuriyet was blocked by order of a criminal judgeship of peace. A state television presenter was taken off air for saying “I’m a pet mum too” at the end of a Mother’s Day broadcast. The list goes on and on.

Even so, podcasts are on air, independent news sites are working, YouTube channels are producing news. As the traditional media shrinks, the riverbed of news shifts, but the flow does not stop. The number of people learning to open a new door next to the one that was closed grows every day. Is it risky? Of course. Yet there are those who show this courage.

I am not telling all this to prettify the picture or to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes. The lawyer waiting for a case in the courthouse corridor, the journalist waiting at the prison gate to send greetings to a detained colleague, the worker setting out to demand their wages have this in common: whatever their views or background, they have a conscience and they try to do their jobs as well as they can. It would be a lie to say they are not afraid. They are. But they still do what they can. The release order in the hand of the journalist who walks out after three months in detention shows that acting despite fear can pay off.