Turkey was put on notice by the United Nations for a systematic and deliberate campaign to crack down on lawyers and judges with blatant abuse of counterterrorism laws in order to punish them for representing critics, opponents and dissidents.

A recent report submitted to the UN Human Rights Council by Diego García-Sayán, special rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers, highlighted the practice of Turkish prosecutors who routinely launch cases against lawyers on terrorism charges for activities undertaken in the discharge of their professional duties.

Prosecutors who follow the political guidelines of the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan also associate lawyers with the alleged crimes of their clients, according to the report.

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The UN reported that between 2016 and 2022 more than 1,600 lawyers were prosecuted and 615 were placed in pretrial detention. Four hundred seventy-four lawyers have been sentenced to a total of 2,966 years in prison on the grounds of membership in a “terrorist organization”.

Read more: Nordic Monitor