(Adnkronos) – Turkey did not offer a fair trial to 239 opponents, incarcerated for alleged links to the failed 2016 coup simply because they used a mobile phone app. This is the condemnation of the European Court of Human Rights, which condemned “the categorical approach of national courts with respect to the use of ByLock”, the encrypted messaging application that according to the applicants was the only basis on which they were imprisoned.
The detainees were accused of being followers of the late imam Fethullah Gulen, whom Ankara attributes the direction of the coup, and were convicted as members of his Hizmet movement. According to them, the national courts painted ByLock as “designed for the exclusive use” of the movement. “With this approach, anyone found to be a ByLock user could, in principle, be convicted on that basis alone for belonging to an armed terrorist organization,” the Strasbourg-based court said.
For Ankara, ByLock would have been the preferred communication tool for those responsible for the 2016 coup attempt, which caused the death of 250 people and was followed by arrests and purges on a scale unprecedented in Turkey’s modern history. According to the Istanbul prosecutor’s office, since then the authorities have arrested more than 25,000 people accused of belonging to the Hizmet movement, of whom about 9,000 have been held in custody. The ECHR recalled that its Grand Chamber, whose decisions are binding, had already condemned Turkey on the same grounds in a similar case in September 2023, highlighting the existence of a “systemic problem” that concerns a large number of people and must be resolved at the national level.
