Lawyers’ groups call for detained attorneys’ release as new judicial year begins

Five legal organizations opened Turkey’s new judicial year with a call to free detained lawyers, turning the ceremony outside Ankara’s Sıhhiye Courthouse into a denunciation of mounting pressure on the profession.

Adalet için Hukukçular, the Ankara branches of the Contemporary Lawyers’ Association (ÇHD) and the Association for Lawyers for Freedom (ÖHD), Hukukçu Dayanışması and Toplumsal Hukuk said lawyers were entering the new year under poverty, insecurity and legal pressure. They said young employee lawyers faced especially difficult conditions, alongside rising workplace harassment, violence at enforcement sites and poverty in daily life.

The groups accused the state of applying injustice as policy. They said police raids had become routine and that the presumption of innocence and other basic legal principles were being eroded. Their statement described new attacks as being announced daily through television screens and official statements, calling the situation “legal massacres carried out with the judicial stick.”

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We are witnessing legal massacres carried out with the judicial stick.

The organizations also demanded the release of lawyers detained in cases linked to professional activities and protests surrounding a NATO summit in Ankara in July. They named ÇHD honorary chair Selçuk Kozağaçlı, ÖHD member Sezin Uçar, Can Atalay, Mehmet Pehlivan, ÇHD Istanbul branch chair Ezgi Önalan, and ÇHD members Doğa İncesu and Yunusemre Işık, as well as lawyer Berdan İdil Öksüz.

They said Kozağaçlı and other ÇHD lawyers faced what they described as a second punishment through the extension of their imprisonment. They also said Uçar had been held since April 15 and that Atalay had remained imprisoned since April 25, 2022, despite Constitutional Court violation rulings. The groups said they would enter the judicial year focused on detained colleagues and their clients rather than institutions of power.

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We are entering the new judicial year by turning our faces from palaces to the streets, from courtrooms to squares, and from lawmakers to our detained colleagues and clients.