Background
The 43 applicants were Turkish military officers of various ranks and serving or former police officers who were arrested and placed in pre-trial detention following the failed coup attempt of 15–16 July 2016, in which members of the Turkish armed forces killed 251 people and injured over 2,000 in an effort to overthrow the elected government. Turkish authorities attributed the coup to the network of Fetullah Gülen, designated by Ankara as the Fetullahist Terror Organisation/Parallel State Structure (FETÖ/PDY). The applicants were suspected of participation in the coup attempt and membership of an armed terrorist organisation on grounds including planning or commanding the coup, attacking strategic state buildings, using military assets, and aiding the putschists.
Turkey declared a state of emergency on 21 July 2016 and notified the Council of Europe of a derogation from the Convention under Article 15; both measures remained in force until July 2018. During and after the emergency, domestic courts ordered and repeatedly extended the applicants’ pre-trial detention on the basis of the catalogue-offence presumption in Article 100 § 3 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, the seriousness of the charges, the severity of potential penalties, and risks of absconding, reoffending, and evidence-tampering. The applicants’ challenges before domestic courts, including individual applications to the Constitutional Court, were unsuccessful. Their pre-trial detention lasted between two years and four years and six months.
The applicants lodged applications with the European Court of Human Rights complaining that the domestic courts had failed to provide relevant and sufficient reasons for ordering and extending their detention and that the judicial review of detention was ineffective, in violation of Article 5 §§ 3 and 4 of the Convention. The Court joined all 43 applications and examined them as a single case.
The Court’s Holding
The Court unanimously held that there had been a violation of Article 5 § 3 of the Convention in respect of all applicants. It accepted that throughout the detention period there was a reasonable suspicion that the applicants had committed the alleged offences, and that during the initial phase of proceedings — including while the state of emergency was in force — the domestic courts had provided relevant and sufficient reasons for detention. The combination of grounds, including the ongoing security situation, the scale of the coup attempt, the risk that suspects had fled, and the continuing investigations, was sufficiently substantiated and individualised to justify deprivation of liberty at the outset.
However, the Court found that once the state of emergency was lifted in July 2018 and Turkey’s derogation from the Convention ended, the domestic courts came under a strict obligation to conduct a fresh assessment of the necessity of continued detention and to consider alternative measures. As time passed, the risks relied upon inevitably diminished, requiring increasingly specific and individualised reasoning. The domestic courts failed to discharge that obligation: they repeated the same formulaic grounds, made no meaningful assessment of how the risks had evolved, gave no consideration to less intrusive alternatives, and ignored the applicants’ individual circumstances. Detention extending beyond two years — and in some cases to four and a half years — without adequate re-evaluation could not be justified under Article 5 § 3.
In light of its Article 5 § 3 finding, the Court declined to separately examine the remaining Article 5 § 4 complaints concerning the effectiveness of judicial review of detention. On just satisfaction, it awarded each applicant a lump sum of EUR 2,000 in respect of non-pecuniary damage and costs and expenses, consistent with its approach in the leading group case of Turan and Others v. Turkey.
Key Takeaways
- A statutory presumption of detention grounds under national law (Article 100 § 3 of Turkey’s Code of Criminal Procedure) does not, by itself, satisfy the “relevant and sufficient reasons” requirement of Article 5 § 3 of the Convention.
- Emergency-era justifications for pre-trial detention do not automatically carry over after a state of emergency is lifted: domestic courts must conduct a fresh, individualised assessment of continued necessity and consider alternative measures.
- Formulaic, repetitive extension orders that fail to account for the passage of time, the evolution of risks, and the detainee’s individual circumstances violate Article 5 § 3, regardless of the gravity of the underlying offences.
- The gravity of charges and severity of potential penalties, standing alone, cannot justify prolonged pre-trial detention; the reasoning must become more specific and individualised as detention lengthens.
Why It Matters
This judgment is the latest in a long line of Strasbourg rulings arising from Turkey’s post-coup crackdown, reinforcing that even extraordinary security threats do not suspend the core procedural guarantees of Article 5. By drawing a clear temporal line at the lifting of the state of emergency, the Court signals that derogation-era latitude has firm outer limits: once normalcy returns, detention must be justified on its own merits, with reasoning that keeps pace with changing circumstances.
For practitioners, the case confirms that national courts cannot coast on initial detention orders in long-running proceedings. The obligation to reassess detention grounds with increasing rigour as time passes applies in all member states, making this decision relevant wherever defendants face prolonged pre-trial custody on serious organised-crime or terrorism charges. The EUR 2,000 lump-sum award, pegged to the Turan and Others framework, also signals the Court’s continued use of standardised just satisfaction in high-volume group cases.