The Arrested Lawyers

3) The escalation of the government witch-hunt targeting lawyers’ spouses and their children shows the extent and intensity of the ongoing crackdown on the legal profession and by extension the right to legal counsel & access to lawyers for tens of thousands of victims in Turkey.

4) According to the documents reviewed by Nordic Monitor, the Turkish government investigated the spouses and children of 28 lawyers including prominent attorneys who have been jailed or forced to live in exile since the crackdown started in 2015 and intensified a year later.

6) The investigation documents were found in docket No. 2017/134 of the Ankara 22nd High Criminal Court, which is hearing the trials of dozens of jailed lawyers.

7) The Masak report, dated July 13, 2018, reveals how intrusive the Turkish government was in its campaign of intimidation of lawyers who were harassed and threatened with the prosecution of family members on fabricated charges.

8) The report lists 83 people as being targeted, indicating that some of the lawyers have more than one child and that all of them were listed as suspected criminals in an unprecedented prosecution of against lawyers and rights defenders.

9) The Erdoğan government started systematically investigating lawyers long before a failed coup in 2016, arresting them and putting them in pre-trial detention in large numbers to prevent many defendants from accessing lawyers.

10) Lawyers were targeted because they represented critics and opponents of the government in legal cases, defended their rights in the courtroom. Today, lawyers’ themselves have difficulty finding and hiring lawyers, many of whom are afraid of being detained due to their clients