A legal and empirical assessment of Turkey’s post-2016 purges
June 2016
The Italian Federation for Human Rights (FIDU) has published a major new report documenting the ongoing consequences of Turkey’s post-coup emergency purges. The report is authored by lawyer Ali Yıldız, founder and director of the Arrested Lawyers Initiative; Turkish economist Dr. Mustafa Günaydın; and PhD candidate and research analyst Mustafa Sagir. Titled Civil Death in Practice: A Legal and Empirical Assessment of Turkey’s Post-2016 Purges, the report is released on the eve of the tenth anniversary of the 15 July 2016 coup attempt and asks a question that has received far less attention than the purges themselves: What has become of the 162,239 civil servants dismissed by executive decree since that night?
The survey: acquittal changes nothing
The report’s empirical core is a structured survey of 1,629 people dismissed under the Emergency Decrees, conducted in October–November 2025. The respondents, coming from all sectors of public service and most of them mid-career professionals with between six and twenty years of experience, reflect the breadth of the purge. The results are stark. Some 70.9% of respondents reported having job applications rejected or being dismissed from posts specifically because of their KHK status. Nearly two-thirds — 65.3% — could not find any formally insured employment after dismissal. More than half (52.9%) encountered the administrative blacklisting code “36/OHAL/KHK” in their records.
Perhaps the most significant finding concerns the irrelevance of criminal acquittal to the administrative exclusion. Among respondents who reported the outcomes of their criminal proceedings, outcomes establishing no criminal liability — acquittals, dismissals of charges, decisions not to prosecute — outnumbered convictions, reaching 48.3% of reported cases. Yet nearly two-thirds of those acquitted still could not find insured employment, and more than two-thirds continued to have applications rejected because of their status. The criminal and administrative tracks ran in parallel and a favourable outcome on one did nothing to undo the other. Among those who faced criminal proceedings, nearly a third were acquitted — yet none were reinstated to public service.
Among those who volunteered the detail in open-ended answers, pre-trial detention before eventual acquittal ranged from nine days to two years. Criminal proceedings that ended in acquittal lasted between four and nine years.
The Code 36 blacklist: automated, permanent, unchallengeable
The report identifies the “36/OHAL/KHK” designation — applied in the records of the Social Security Institution (SGK) and the Turkish Employment Agency (İŞKUR) — as the central mechanism through which exclusion is reproduced. The code travels with the individual across institutions: the land registry system (TAKBİS), notarial records, the social-assistance database (SOYBİS), and banking transactions all surface the same flag. Because the marking operates automatically and carries no judicial annotation, it requires no official to act in bad faith. The discrimination it produces is structural, not intentional.
Respondents described banks refusing routine transactions, being recorded as “problematic persons” in land-registry dealings despite the absence of any lien, and having credit and loan applications constantly rejected. On average, respondents reported experiencing around 4 of the thirty catalogued forms of discrimination; more than half were excluded across three or more distinct domains of life simultaneously.
Families caught in the net
The exclusion did not stop with the dismissed individual. More than a third of respondents (35.7%) reported that a first-degree relative had also been purged under an Emergency Decree. Nearly three in ten (29.7%) reported that a spouse or child — holding no KHK status of their own — had nonetheless faced discrimination because of the respondent’s status: banks closing off family transactions, spouses removed from doctoral programmes, children refused entry to professions such as policing on account of a parent’s dismissal.
The legal framework: from emergency to authoritarian constitutionalism
Chapter I of the report reconstructs the legal architecture of the thirty-two Emergency Decrees and sets it against the derogation requirements of Article 15 ECHR and Article 4 ICCPR. Seventeen of the decrees operated not by formulating abstract norms but by annexing lists of named individuals and institutions — no individualised reasoning, no evidentiary assessment, no adversarial procedure. Sanctions rested on broadly worded formulas: “membership, affiliation, connection, or contact” with organisations deemed a national-security threat.
What were presented as temporary emergency measures produced permanent legal consequences — lifetime bans from public service, cancellation of passports and professional licences, secondary prohibitions across law, medicine, engineering, education, accounting, and maritime professions. When the State of Emergency formally ended in July 2018, Law No. 7145 extended summary dismissal authority until 2022; the exceptional became routine. The report traces this trajectory as a shift from emergency law as constitutional self-defence to emergency law as an instrument of status re-engineering, producing a legally constructed out-group within the citizenry.
The report calls on the Turkish government to immediately dismantle the 36/OHAL/KHK blacklisting system, enact automatic reinstatement procedures for those acquitted, ensure full compliance with the Grand Chamber judgments in Yalçınkaya v. Turkey (26 September 2023) and Yasak v. Turkey (5 May 2026), repeal all secondary professional prohibitions, and end collective punishment of family members. To the European Union, the report recommends that any upgrade in EU–Turkey relations be made expressly conditional on measurable progress on KHK remediation and that KHK dismissal status be treated as a relevant factor in asylum and subsidiary protection assessments.
The report is available in English and Turkish
https://fidu.it/wp-content/uploads/Civil-Death-in-Practice_-A-Legal-and-Empirical-Assessment-of-Turkeys-Post-2016-Purges-FIDU.pdf
https://fidu.it/wp-content/uploads/Uygulamada-Medeni-Olum-2016-Sonrasi-OHAL-Ihraclarinin-Hukuki-ve-Ampirik-Degerlendirmesi-FIDU.pdf