TEN YEARS AFTER 15 JULY

WHERE POWER REMAINS SILENT, THE LAW MUST SPEAK

A genuine reckoning with a coup must examine not only those accused, but also those who managed the intelligence, concealed the report, and turned the purge into an opportunity.

Ten years have passed. Every year, the government speaks more loudly about 15 July, yet it remains equally silent regarding the most critical hours of that night. Its political and media allies have erected a wall of immunity around this silence: label anyone who raises questions as a “putschist,” a “traitor,” or someone “speaking the language of the organization,” and then dismiss the questions themselves. Yet unquestioningly accepting the official narrative of those in power is not a civic duty. The duty of citizens is to scrutinize the State; the duty of the State is to disclose the documents in its possession.

The first and most fundamental question is this: Where is the final report of the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry into 15 July? The Commission concluded its work on 4 January 2017. The then Chairman of the Commission, Reşat Petek, stated that the report had been submitted to the Speaker of Parliament on 12 July 2017. Nevertheless, the report was never placed on the agenda of the General Assembly, its whereabouts became unclear within the parliamentary records, and it has never been made public together with its annexes. This extraordinary situation became the subject of an official parliamentary question in 2020 and, in June 2026, of a new parliamentary initiative consisting of twenty-four questions. Requests for the disclosure of flight records, telephone communications involving key public officials and politicians, as well as previously rejected parliamentary motions, have likewise remained unanswered. If the report concerning an event that fundamentally altered the lives of hundreds of thousands of people has remained unavailable for ten years, then the government’s claim that “everything has been clarified” rests not on established truth, but solely on the strength of its own political narrative.

Even more troubling is the fact that those who could have shed light on the unresolved aspects of the events were deliberately excluded from the parliamentary inquiry. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, then Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım, Chief of the General Staff Hulusi Akar, and the Director of the National Intelligence Organization (MIT), Hakan Fidan, were never called to testify. The minutes of the Parliamentary Commission dated 1 December 2016 are particularly revealing. Members of the Commission who requested that Akar and Fidan be heard emphasized that the most critical period was between approximately 3:30 p.m. and 10:00 p.m.; that the intelligence received by MIT had been regarded as sufficiently serious to justify measures such as closing the airspace and preventing armored units from leaving their barracks. When the Chair was asked to put the proposal to a vote, the response was simply that “the process is continuing,” and no vote was held. During the same meeting, the Chair spent considerable time explaining the legal notices and content-removal decisions taken against journalists who had criticized the Commission. In the end, numerous individuals—including officials from the Turkish Red Crescent and Borsa İstanbul—were heard, yet the two highest-ranking figures responsible for the country’s military and intelligence institutions never appeared before Parliament. Choosing to silence criticism instead of answering it, and calling peripheral witnesses instead of hearing the key decision-makers, cannot be described as a genuine parliamentary inquiry; it is better understood as the selective choice of witnesses in support of an official narrative.

The questions remain remarkably straightforward: What exactly was the content of the intelligence warning? What discussions took place between Hakan Fidan and Hulusi Akar during those hours? If the warning was considered serious enough to restrict military flights and prevent armored units from leaving their barracks, why were the President and the Prime Minister not informed immediately? Why were the commanders of the armed forces not convened around a common crisis table? Why did the preventive orders fail to become effective across all military units? As members of the Parliamentary Commission themselves asked, why was the available time not used effectively? And why were the accounts of Erdoğan, Yıldırım, Akar, and Fidan never subjected to cross-examination? These are questions that should have been answered not at the headquarters of a political party, but through an independent investigation conducted under official record.

I do not advance simplistic conclusions here. Not every unexplained event proves that the coup was planned by those in power or that it was deliberately allowed to unfold. In criminal law, suspicion can never substitute for proof. Yet the same principle has consequences for governments as well: an administration that withholds evidence, refuses to hear key witnesses, fails to publish the parliamentary report, and suppresses questions through political labeling cannot escape political responsibility for the doubts that inevitably arise. Invoking “conspiracy theories” is not a legitimate excuse for refusing to disclose documentary evidence. Those who evade transparency cannot reasonably expect unquestioning trust from society.

The case of Adil Öksüz represents perhaps the clearest illustration of this double standard. Presented by the government as one of the principal civilian organizers of the coup attempt, Öksüz was apprehended together with pilots leaving Akıncı Air Base. Following his claim that he had merely been “looking for farmland,” he was released by Judge Köksal Şahin. The prosecutor’s objection was later reviewed by Judge Çetin Sönmez, who likewise declined to reverse the release order, after which Öksüz disappeared. Parliamentary records show that even an AK Party member of Parliament described the circumstances as “a mystery,” while former Director General of Security Mehmet Kılıçlar remarked that the claim of someone inspecting real estate while military aircraft were flying that night was “something even the crows would laugh at.” Questions concerning whether documents had been removed from the investigation file, whether telephone instructions had influenced Öksüz’s release, and whether negligence had occurred throughout the chain of decisions leading to his release were all raised before the Parliamentary Commission. A government unable to explain the striking disparity between the prolonged detention of individuals merely because they held accounts at Bank Asya and the release, within two days, of the individual described as the “black box” of the coup cannot credibly claim to be acting in the interests of justice.

The manner in which the government itself interpreted 15 July is perhaps best illustrated by President Erdoğan’s own words. Before the coup attempt had even been fully suppressed, he declared at Atatürk Airport that the events constituted “a great blessing from God” because they would provide an opportunity to cleanse the armed forces. The very next day, 2,745 judges and prosecutors were suspended from office, and within only a few days tens of thousands of soldiers, teachers, police officers, and other public servants became the subject of administrative or criminal proceedings. It is self-evident that it is impossible to prepare individually assessed, verifiable, and legally reviewable case files for thousands of people overnight. The speed of these measures gives credibility to the suspicion that purge lists had already been prepared before the coup attempt and that the events of 15 July merely provided the justification for putting those lists into operation. Making this observation does not amount to denying the coup attempt itself. Rather, it suggests that a genuine attack on the constitutional order was used by those in power as an opportunity to legitimize a purge that had already been contemplated.

Moreover, the government cannot portray itself solely as the victim of this narrative. As the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe has itself recorded, the Gülen movement had long been a political ally of the governing party and had operated lawfully for many years. If it is argued that the movement gained significant influence within the judiciary, law enforcement, education, and the state bureaucracy, then the political decisions that enabled and protected that influence must also be subjected to scrutiny. Who appointed these officials? Who promoted them? Who facilitated their advancement? Why did the government applaud investigations such as Ergenekon and Balyoz, which were later discredited and had been produced by the very same judicial and law-enforcement structures? Yesterday’s political partner was transformed into today’s public enemy, yet the political dimension of that partnership has never appeared before a court, nor even been subjected to serious political accountability. Instead, the burden fell upon teachers, shopkeepers, students, and entire families, while the politicians responsible portrayed themselves as heroes.

Even the figures announced by Minister of Justice Akın Gürlek on 12 July 2026 fail to conceal the true scale of this system. Judicial proceedings were initiated against 720,338 individuals; 127,102 people were convicted, 124,743 were acquitted, while proceedings concerning another 83,404 individuals remain ongoing. At the time of the announcement, 10,485 people remained in prison, and arrest warrants had been issued for 33,827 others. By contrast, the total number of persons convicted in what the Minister himself described as “cases concerning the actual coup attempt” amounted to only 4,891. Few statistics could more clearly demonstrate that those directly involved in the coup attempt and hundreds of thousands of other individuals were ultimately placed within the same vast framework of criminal suspicion.

Government officials and their spokespersons often present the more than 124,000 acquittals as evidence of the judiciary’s meticulousness. Such an argument resembles praising a physician for the size of the wound he himself inflicted. If an individual who was ultimately acquitted spent months in detention, lost employment, had his or her passport cancelled, saw children stigmatized at school, and watched an entire family condemned to years of economic hardship, then simply stating that the person was “eventually acquitted” cannot be regarded as justice. Government-aligned media likewise tend to ignore acquittals while repeatedly publishing the photographs taken at the moment of arrest as though they constituted lasting proof of guilt. This is because the objective of such a system is not to establish the truth, but rather to preserve a permanent climate of suspicion through which obedience can be produced.

The emergency decrees issued during the state of emergency became the legal façade for this political purge. As early as December 2016, the Venice Commission concluded that the powers exercised exceeded the limits imposed by both the Turkish Constitution and international law; that mass dismissals carried out through personalized lists lacked individualized assessment, were unsupported by verifiable evidence, abolished essential guarantees of defence, and even extended punitive consequences to family members. According to official statistics, 125,678 public servants were dismissed and 2,761 institutions were closed. Of the 127,292 applications submitted to the State of Emergency Inquiry Commission, only 17,960 were accepted, while 109,332 were rejected. Removing a person from public service overnight and then forcing that individual to wait for years before a closed administrative file does not constitute an effective legal remedy; it amounts to bureaucratic suffering.

At the same time, the judiciary itself—the institution expected to supervise the purge—was increasingly brought under the influence of the executive. Thousands of judges and prosecutors were dismissed overnight, while the transparency of the subsequent mass recruitment process has remained the subject of persistent criticism. In 2024, the United Nations Human Rights Committee expressed concern that judges and prosecutors had been removed without adequate procedural safeguards and noted allegations that new appointments were vulnerable to political influence and executive control. Restrictions on defence access to case files, interference with lawyer-client meetings, and prolonged pre-trial detention were likewise highlighted in the same report. Where judges fear for their own future whenever they render decisions that displease those in power, courts may continue to exist in appearance, but judicial independence no longer does.

The judgments of the European Court of Human Rights demonstrate that this deterioration is not isolated but systemic. In Akgün v. Türkiye, the Court held that the mere technical finding of ByLock use could not by itself establish reasonable suspicion. In Turan and Others v. Türkiye, it ruled that the concept of flagrante delicto could not be expanded in an unforeseeable manner to justify the detention of judges and prosecutors. Most significantly, in the Grand Chamber judgment of Yüksel Yalçınkaya v. Türkiye, the Court concluded that treating ByLock as an automatic presumption of criminal guilt violated the principles of legality and the right to a fair trial, while relying on lawful trade union membership and association membership as evidence also violated freedom of association. Referring to approximately 100,000 alleged ByLock users and thousands of similar applications pending before it, the Court expressly characterized the problem as systemic.

The judgments delivered in 2026 have completely undermined the government’s claim that only “a few cases” involved judicial errors. In its Grand Chamber judgment in Yasak v. Türkiye of 5 May 2026, the European Court of Human Rights held that the principle of no punishment without law had been violated because neither individual culpability nor criminal intent had been established in a foreseeable manner. The Court also found a violation of the prohibition of inhuman or degrading treatment owing to the applicant’s conditions of detention. Shortly thereafter, on 23 June 2026, the Court delivered additional judgments concerning a total of 893 applicants in the Kılıçarslan, Çalı, and Dönmez groups of cases, once again finding violations of the Convention. For hundreds of thousands of cases, the government’s allies within the judiciary reproduced the same judicial template over and over again; Strasbourg is now presenting Türkiye, case by case, with the legal consequences of that mass-produced injustice.

The darkest face of this unlawful process emerged in police custody and in prisons. In its reports published in 2016 and 2017, Human Rights Watch documented allegations of severe beatings, stress positions, sleep deprivation, sexual assault, and threats of rape. It also documented ten torture cases involving twenty-two victims, as well as enforced disappearance cases indicating the possible involvement of state officials. Every allegation must, of course, be examined through an independent and impartial investigation. Nevertheless, when the United Nations Human Rights Committee stated in 2024 that increasing allegations of torture and ill-treatment, combined with ineffective investigations, had created a climate of de facto impunity, Türkiye responded in 2025 by once again invoking its policy of “zero tolerance.” Yet “zero tolerance” remains little more than a slogan if no meaningful information is provided concerning how many public officials have actually been investigated and prosecuted.

This system drove people not only into prisons but also into the waters of the Meriç (Evros) River and the Aegean Sea. In November 2017, the bodies of Hüseyin and Nur Maden and their children Nadire, Bahar, and Feridun were found on the shores of Lesbos after the family attempted to leave Türkiye through irregular means because of criminal investigations and passport restrictions. In February 2018, a woman and two children drowned while attempting to cross the Meriç River. In July 2018, teacher Hatice Akçabay and her three young children disappeared after their boat capsized. The immediate physical causes of these deaths were sinking boats and dangerous waters. Yet a government that leaves its own citizens without passports, without employment, publicly stigmatized, and deprived of any realistic hope of a fair trial cannot deny its political share of responsibility for the resulting humanitarian tragedy.

The path toward a genuine reckoning is clear. The report of the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry should be published in its entirety, together with all annexes, dissenting opinions, rejected motions, and official correspondence. President Erdoğan, former Prime Minister Yıldırım, Hulusi Akar, and Hakan Fidan should appear before an independent commission. The timeline of the intelligence warning, the flight records, telephone communications, and military orders issued during the critical hours should all be disclosed. An effective investigation should be conducted into the chain of decisions that led to the release of Adil Öksüz, the allegations concerning missing material from the investigation file, and the possible responsibility of all public officials involved in his escape. The bureaucratic consequences of the former political alliance between the AK Party and the Gülen movement should likewise be examined from the perspective of political accountability. Convictions that fail to establish individual criminal intent and an organic connection to criminal activity through concrete evidence should be reopened and reassessed. Those unlawfully dismissed from public service should have their positions, reputations, and losses restored. Finally, the shield of impunity protecting public officials in cases involving torture, enforced disappearance, and deaths in custody must be dismantled.

Those who were killed on the night of 15 July and those who suffered unlawful treatment in its aftermath are not competing victims. Honouring the memory of those who lost their lives does not require unquestioningly accepting everything said by those in power; on the contrary, it requires asking why those individuals could not be protected. Those responsible for bombing Parliament must unquestionably be held accountable. Yet those who rendered Parliament incapable of exercising its constitutional power of oversight, who concealed the Commission’s report from the public, and who transformed half of the country’s population into objects of suspicion also bear democratic and legal responsibility.

Ten years later, one conclusion remains unmistakably clear:

15 July does not belong to the Erdoğan government. It is neither the political property of the AK Party nor a loyalty test to be used by its political and media allies to silence dissent. Coups are criminal precisely because they suspend the rule of law. Yet when an elected government likewise renders the law ineffective through emergency decrees, mass dismissal lists, courts perceived to act under political instruction, and the concealment of official reports, it gradually exhausts its own democratic legitimacy. Neither military coups, nor terrorism, nor elected governments possess the right to place themselves above the law.

REFERENCES AND AUTHORITIES

(As of 12 July 2026)

1. Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), Resolution 2156 (2017); Grand National Assembly of Türkiye (TBMM) records (official death toll: 251).
2. Minutes of the TBMM Commission; Parliamentary Question of 14 February 2020; News report of 5 June 2026 concerning the whereabouts of the Commission report.
3. TBMM 15 July Commission of Inquiry, Minutes of the 19th Meeting, 1 December 2016.
4. TBMM 15 July Commission of Inquiry, Minutes of 2 and 24 November 2016.
5. Time, Erdoğan’s “gift from God” statement and the first purges following the coup attempt, July 2016.
6. Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Resolution 2156 (2017), §§14–20; Le Monde, 22 October 2024.
7. Statement by Minister of Justice Akın Gürlek, 12 July 2026.
8. Venice Commission, CDL-AD(2016)037, 12 December 2016, §§224–227.
9. UK Home Office, Gülenist Movement, Turkey, August 2025.
10. United Nations Human Rights Committee, CCPR/C/TUR/CO/2, 28 November 2024, §§39–46.
11. ECtHR, Akgün v. Türkiye, 20 July 2021; Turan and Others v. Türkiye, 23 November 2021.
12. ECtHR (Grand Chamber), Yüksel Yalçınkaya v. Türkiye, 26 September 2023.
13. ECtHR (Grand Chamber), Yasak v. Türkiye, 5 May 2026.
14. ECtHR, Kılıçarslan, Çalı, and Dönmez and Others v. Türkiye, 23 June 2026.
15. Human Rights Watch, A Blank Check (2016) and In Custody (2017).
16. United Nations Human Rights Committee, Concluding Observations (2024); Türkiye’s follow-up response under the Convention against Torture, 12 August 2025.
17. Euronews, 23 November 2017 and 20 July 2018; Reuters, 28 March 2018.