Between September 12 and 14, coordinated police raids across five Turkish cities targeted organisations defending LGBT rights, part of an operation the justice minister said involved 162 people under investigation; Human Rights Watch reported that at least 112 people were arrested and that a court in Mersin detained six activists including a lawyer. When lawyers gathered on September 15 outside the Çağlayan courthouse in Istanbul to read a press statement against the raids, they were detained too. The IAPL Monitoring Committee has assembled the Turkish bar’s own account of what followed. The Avukat Hakları Grubu names four detained advocates: Cem Gök, Tuğba Yılmaz, Berfin Karaşah and Gülyeter Aktepe. The Istanbul branch of the Progressive Lawyers’ Association reports that its own branch executive was among those taken, that detainees were subjected to physical force including reverse handcuffing, that statements were taken irregularly in the early hours, and that the prosecutor’s office extended custody by a further twenty-four hours. The İzmir Bar Association separately reports that police intervened in a press statement the Bar itself had co-convened, with lawyers and citizens beaten and exposed to gas. The pattern is one in which lawyers are detained first as representatives of disfavoured clients and then, within days, as demonstrators on their own behalf. These accounts come from the bar associations and the Progressive Lawyers’ Association and have not been independently adjudicated; much of the post is in Turkish.

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