Pale-faced and barely out of his teens, it’s hard to say if Onur’s apparently frail demeanor, somewhat in contrast with his height, is a result of his time in detention or simply the way he has always been. Sitting at a cafe in Istanbul, he recounted being sick throughout most of his 20 days in Silivri, the same high-security prison in which the arrested mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem İmamoğlu, has been locked up since March 19 on corruption charges, sparking protests that quickly spread throughout the country.
Everyone got sick during detention at the Vatan Emniyet police station, the special branch for terror suspects, where Onur, whose name has been changed for security reasons, was held.
Already politically active with leftist groups, he knew exactly what could happen when students and young people poured into the streets after the mayor’s arrest. The charges could come easily: resisting the police, supporting a terrorist group, carrying a weapon (which encompasses something as minor as a stone), covering his face, even carrying a placard with a slogan that could be taken as an insult to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. That’s why he moved carefully, mindful of every step.
“I’m on the government’s watch list,” Onur said. “I know that pretty well, so I did nothing in particular. Most of the time, I was helping people to handle [tear] gas, telling them what to do when you can’t open your eyes or breathe.”
“I never threw stones, bottles, anything,” he added. “I thought they would maybe bust some people’s houses, but this will not be me because what could they put on my file? They don’t have anything.”
Just days into the protests, hundreds were detained in early morning raids on their homes. In total, nearly 2,000 people were detained at protests and in raids across the country during March. According to a statement by the chief public prosecutor’s office in early April, 819 people faced prosecution across 20 different investigations. According to the Istanbul Bar Association, at least 239 were formally arrested and held in pretrial detention. Onur was one of them.
“I just switched on the light in my room and saw guns pointing at me, police officers there. I was just looking at them, they were looking at me, I couldn’t understand. That shock, I cannot explain it,” he said, recounting the morning he was arrested. “They were searching my house, asking questions: Do you have any Molotov cocktails, rifles, guns, hand grenades? I told them no, there is nothing in my house, just books.”
The main piece of evidence in Onur’s court file is a photograph that shows him holding a banner, surrounded by others doing the same, in which he is identified by his name and ID number, tagged in the picture above his head. That image alone was enough for prosecutors to charge him with participating in an unauthorized assembly and failing to disperse, under Turkey’s Law 2911 on meetings and demonstrations.
At the time, the local governor had imposed a blanket ban on demonstrations. The law has been repeatedly criticized by human rights organizations and struck down in several cases by the European Court of Human Rights for violating basic freedoms. Critics argue that it contradicts Turkey’s own constitution, which guarantees the right to peaceful protest.
Onur is not alone. Dozens of pages from two separate police reports, obtained by New Lines and submitted as evidence against the protesters, show more than 100 young people captured by police cameras — the vast majority simply standing in the crowd, some wearing face masks that cover their noses and mouths. The related indictments cite the photos of individuals wearing masks as evidence of a criminal act. Captions beneath some images refer to videos recorded by police and occasionally to additional actions, such as chanting slogans like “Those who don’t jump are Tayyip,” a reference to the Turkish president.
The Gezi Park protests in 2013 marked a turning point in protest surveillance, as Turkish security services used cellphone tracking and extensive social media monitoring to identify and target protesters. In later years, a leaked police report suggested the adoption of more advanced tools, including facial recognition and artificial intelligence — though there continues to be no transparency about how these are used specifically to police protests.
Turkey is not hiding its ambitions to expand AI-driven security. On the contrary, Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya has publicly embraced it. Last year, he announced that, by the end of 2025, all police officers will be equipped with body cameras featuring facial recognition technology, “so that the interaction with citizens will be more transparent.” He also pledged to expand Istanbul’s City Security Management System (KGYS), a nationwide urban surveillance and public safety platform extensively deployed in Turkey’s major cities. KGYS cameras include systems that can automatically recognize and record vehicle license plates. “There won’t be a place without cameras in the streets of Istanbul,” Yerlikaya told local media, adding that the plan is to integrate cameras from corporate firms into the new system.
While there is no transparency about how facial recognition is deployed, tender documents show that, in the last few years, and particularly in the last few months, there has been a flurry of investment in the technology for policing in Turkey.
Publicly available documents obtained and analyzed by New Lines show that, in September 2024, Turkey’s General Directorate of Security initiated a major expansion of its AI-powered facial recognition capabilities, purchasing system components for deployment across 30 provinces. The procurement included 3,500 facial recognition cameras, 200 network switches to link field devices to local or central servers and 278 servers of two types — likely intended for both localized and centralized processing — for a total cost of 73.2 million Turkish liras (approximately $2.6 million at the time). These specifications suggest the deployment of a large-scale biometric surveillance system.
Further investments followed. In May 2025, authorities awarded a contract worth 5.7 million liras ($148,000) to supply facial recognition equipment for the Istanbul police headquarters. Just one day before the arrest of İmamoğlu, on March 18, a separate tender was launched for 13,000 facial recognition cameras, 2,500 mounting units and 2,500 field network switches, with similar specifications to those already deployed — suggesting a massive scale-up of AI-powered surveillance infrastructure. Another tender was issued on April 16 for similar equipment to be used by the Izmir police department.
A photograph obtained by New Lines shows a police officer operating a Chinese-made Hikvision camera at a major rally in Maltepe, Istanbul on March 29 — the first in a new wave of weekly protests launched by the main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), following the daily demonstrations at Sarachane. A similar camera model is mentioned in a March 2025 Interior Ministry procurement tender for the Tokat governorate. According to the manufacturer’s website, it is capable of detecting up to 120 faces simultaneously. While this suggests the government is actively using such surveillance technology, the scale of its deployment remains unclear. The company has been placed on a United States government blacklist over national security concerns, but its cameras are still widely used in Europe.
“One of the key differences between Gezi and today is not just the rise of facial recognition — it’s the sheer volume of data the government now has on citizens, and how easily it can all be connected,” said Ahmet Sabanci, an independent researcher and founder of News Lab Turkey, which focuses on tech and AI.
During the Gezi protests, authorities mostly relied on phone signal triangulation or random ID checks to identify demonstrators in Taksim Square. “Today, with the proliferation of security cameras and CCTV systems, and the integration of all that data, it’s much easier to track where people are, who they are and even what they’ve done in the past,” Sabanci said. Turkey launched a national biometric data system in 2022, available to Turkey’s security agencies, as well as the ministries of the interior and migration.
Turkey is by no means the only country in which government agencies make use of facial recognition technology. A report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace showed that, already in 2019, 78 governments around the world used facial recognition systems. While some have moved to introduce regulations in recent years to prevent abuse of the technology, others — including Turkey — have not. While Turkey’s national AI strategy mentions the need to introduce ethical principles and legal frameworks to govern the use of AI, at present Turkey doesn’t have binding laws that comprehensively regulate its use in policing.
“While certain existing laws provide partial protection, they are not specifically tailored to address the unique challenges posed by AI technologies,” said Vahit Bıçak, an attorney and retired scholar at the Turkish National Police Academy’s Institute of Security Sciences, where he trained police forces for over three decades, specializing in criminal procedure and evidence collection.
The Turkish Constitution provides key safeguards. Article 20 guarantees the right to privacy and the protection of personal data and includes provisions for judicial oversight in the collection, storage and use of personal data, such as biometric information. Article 36 upholds the right to a fair trial, while Article 38 prohibits the use of unlawfully obtained evidence in court. Lawyers argue that, should evidence be obtained without a court order, the data they generate may not be admissible in court. “These constitutional guarantees form a critical baseline, but require complementary legislation and institutional mechanisms to be effective in the age of digital policing,” Bıçak told New Lines.
Turkey’s Personal Data Protection Law outlines a general framework for data processing and applies to information gathered by law enforcement. However, it includes broad exceptions for purposes of national security and crime prevention. “These exceptions, if not narrowly interpreted and strictly monitored, can open the door to unchecked surveillance and data misuse,” Bıçak said.
“That’s exactly the scenario that we’ve been warning against when calling for a complete ban of these systems in public spaces, because it would undermine the enjoyment of so many other rights such as legal protest,” said Kilian Vieth-Ditlmann, head of policy at AlgorithmWatch, a German nongovernmental organization working on the rights implications of the use of AI in Europe. He points out that a similar scenario is currently playing out in Hungary, where the government has banned LGBTQ+ protests and is allowing for the identification of protesters who are nevertheless taking part in them. “The facial recognition features are, these days, already built into the cameras, so the software’s often already integrated in these camera systems,” he explained.
In a cafe tucked away on the upper floors of a historical building in the backstreets of Beyoglu, Istanbul’s central district, Adem was meeting some of his fellow students to hatch out a plan for the following day. It was May 1, and a small group — including some who had recently been released from prison — were planning to walk to Taksim, despite a government ban on protests there. The symbolic square — scene of the Gezi protests in 2013 — once again became a focal point during the March demonstrations, when students protesting in front of the municipality building at Sarachane symbolically attempted to break through the barricade built by hundreds of officers in front of a Roman aqueduct, the main road leading to the square.
For over a decade now, the government has effectively banned all protests in Taksim, determined to keep the square a sterile, depoliticized space — a thoroughfare for tourists on their way to Istanbul’s main shopping street, rather than the powerful political symbol it once was. The level of paranoia is so high that in late April, after a powerful earthquake struck the city and sent panicked residents fleeing to nearby Gezi Park, police swiftly dismantled the handful of tents some had tried to set up there.
“I think we’re all a little bit afraid. But since they really made a joke out of the judiciary system, it’s like we know that we’re not criminals,” said Adem, whose name has been changed for security reasons. “We know that we will not be arrested on charges that really matter. I think what we’re trying to do is more important than being arrested, or beaten.” A student at a private university in Istanbul, Adem took part in the March protests but was spared detention or arrest. “They really beat you in the streets because they want to suppress the movement. A lot of our friends were in really bad conditions health-wise, psychologically and physically. It takes a toll on you,” he said. At the March protests, he recounted, it was common for police to surround the protesters and barricade them.
“They then ordered us to leave the area through narrow tunnels, so tight you could only exit one at a time. They forced each person to remove their mask and identify themselves,” he recalled. In Turkey, covering your face during public demonstrations that are deemed to serve as “propaganda for a terrorist organization” constitutes a separate criminal offense. Most people at the protests wore face coverings to shield themselves from tear gas, but the law’s broad wording leaves ample room for interpretation — and some were prosecuted because of it. Still, many believe the real purpose was to discourage protesters from returning to the streets. The constant hum of drones overhead was often drowned out by chants, but everyone was aware of their presence, of the cameras fixed to police cars and riot control vehicles, and — according to several accounts — other surveillance devices operated by officers assigned to monitor the crowds.
With facial recognition technology enabling authorities to identify individuals, whether in real time or afterward, a single face in a crowd is no longer anonymous. In Turkey, an individual can now be prosecuted over a collective violation. What stands out to Gülizar Tuncer, a veteran human rights lawyer, is how little effort the authorities made to link protesters to any broader organization — something they usually attempt in such cases. People were arrested individually for the simple act of being present at a demonstration, then tried en masse. Tuncer’s son Jana was also charged with participating in an unauthorized assembly, according to an indictment that included dozens of others. The key piece of evidence against him, once again, was a photograph in which he was simply seen among other protesters.
When Jana — a first-year student at Galatasaray University — started going to the protests, Gülizar knew there was a risk he might be beaten or arrested. What she didn’t expect was to see police show up at their home at 5 a.m. and take him away two days after they had begun, in a manner normally reserved for organized crime or terrorism cases. Something was off, she thought — the scales of justice had tipped even further out of balance.
“The home searches, compared to other operations, were not done in detail. When police came to our house, they didn’t confiscate phones or look at computers. The searches were very superficial,” she said. “Because the purpose is not to find evidence of a crime, the purpose is to intimidate. If you walk on the street, you will be arrested. In Turkey today, walking is a crime.”
In its analysis of indictments for two opening trials that took place on April 18, Human Rights Watch found that, out of 189 defendants, 107 were charged under Article 32/1 of Turkey’s law on public gatherings — for being there.
“What’s very new in these cases is seeing people put in pretrial detention with this without any evidence that they violently resisted the police,” said Emma Sinclair-Webb, associate director at Human Rights Watch, noting that pretrial detention should be a precautionary measure used in cases where suspects could escape or tamper with evidence. “The majority of people are accused not of carrying a weapon or concealing their faces even, but just of being there.”
Sinclair-Webb noted that some defendants are facing charges of inciting a crime based solely on social media posts that, she said, contained no calls for violence or criminality.
“There’s a few cases like that in the courts. But what we haven’t yet seen are cases where they have evidence against people for really throwing things at the police, or for violent activity,” she added. “A whole load of people who’d never been in assemblies before were targeted. … And they really, really were shocked when they heard the decision that they were jailed.”
For a few hours after he had been taken in to appear in front of a judge for the first time, Onur thought he was a free citizen.
By this point, he had already been in police custody for three days, lying in an overcrowded cell without seeing any daylight, lights always on. “That cell is torture in itself,” Onur recalled, his account echoing those of many others who endured similar conditions. “There was a horrible noise that never stopped. The ventilation system didn’t work properly, the toilets were disgusting — you could smell the shit easily, and there were bugs everywhere.”
“Time wasn’t passing. There was nothing to do except talk to each other. They didn’t give us proper food, or even water for a long time.” He lost all sense of time, unable to say how many hours or days passed without water — only that what he remembers most vividly is the thirst.
He recalled that, on the day he was taken to the court at Caglayan in Istanbul, a police officer reassured him and others that he believed they would soon be released because “there’s nothing on file.”
He remembered the moment when 13 names in his group were singled out for arrest, while 85 others, including himself, were handed back their ID cards and began collecting their belongings. But minutes later, they were told to wait.
“We didn’t understand anything, so we waited,” he said. “I was still in the building, but I had my ID — I was a free citizen. For four hours or two, I don’t know exactly,” he added, the timeline of his captivity blurring.
That day, Yağmur Kavak, a young lawyer with a brisk smile and large blue eyes, was also in that building, in the prosecutor’s office. She remembers that an assistant in charge of paperwork had a list in hand, with the names of the suspects that were to be released under judicial control, most likely with a signature obligation or a travel ban. She said lawyers had begun informing the families so that they could make their way to the courthouse.
“And then, the prosecutor changed their mind, basically. And they were referred to the court again,” said Kavak, a board member of the Istanbul branch of the Progressive Lawyers’ Association — known by its Turkish acronym CHD — recounting the puzzling experience. “This was very challenging for us, it wasn’t something we had experienced before. If there’s a list, and a decision has been made, then you expect them to be released.” Meanwhile, downstairs, hours after he had collected his belongings, Onur received a WhatsApp message: He would be appearing before a judge.
“In trial, they didn’t even listen to us, they weren’t even looking at our faces,” he said. Eventually, he was transferred to Silivri Prison, the largest high-security complex in Europe, notorious for housing political prisoners. While the material conditions there were better, the psychological pressure remained constant.
“They were trying to break our will — again and again and again,” he said, describing how he refused a strip search and was threatened with solitary confinement. “In Turkish prisons, the architecture itself is designed for this. Every action forces you to kneel. You want to wash your hands? The sink is low, you kneel. You want to eat? The chair is high, the table is low — you kneel. Everything is designed that way. Even the mop stick was cut short, so you had to bend down.”
The episode at the prosecutor’s office was far from the only anomaly lawyers noticed in connection with the arrests and prosecutions tied to the March protests. There were many signs that the rule of law had been dealt another blow, and that the dial of authoritarianism had been turned up a notch.
Two indictments seen by this reporter mention an “affiliated ‘V’ institution” responsible for conducting “closed source” investigations into the protesters and providing information about the suspects’ addresses. Another document, recording a suspect’s police statement, mentions “closed source research and coordination established with the affiliated institution.”
The “V” placeholder, which appears to be a coded designation aimed at avoiding naming the institution, and the “closed source” of the investigations are baffling lawyers, who say the evidence should not be used unless the source is revealed.
“It is not uncommon in Turkish indictments, especially in cases involving intelligence coordination, sensitive institutions or where naming the institution might be deemed to compromise operational details or confidentiality protocols,” the legal scholar Bıçak explained. “It is plausible that it refers to an entity with access to residence or population registry data.”
New Lines contacted the Turkish National Police and the Ministry of Justice for comment, but had not received a response by the time of publication.
Kavak thinks it’s unlikely the placeholder refers to an intelligence department — the case wouldn’t be big enough. And even in those cases, she said, “normally there would be a signature” on the report, “someone could be held responsible.”
“We do not consider those photographs to be legally admissible evidence,” Hürrem Sönmez, general secretary of the Istanbul Bar Association, told New Lines, explaining that recordings and footage taken by police — clearly identifiable as such — during demonstrations and marches “may not be used for any purpose other than the identification of suspects and the collection of evidence of criminal acts.” On the contrary, in this case, they appear to have been used to arbitrarily pick and punish some demonstrators.
Balım İdil Deniz, another CHD lawyer, points out that the photographs were de facto used in police interrogations to obtain the evidence itself. “Where does this information come from? How was it obtained?” she asked. “It’s a trick — if the person responds, their reaction to the photograph is treated as a statement, turning the question into evidence.”
“Public authorities are only permitted to exercise powers that are clearly defined by law,” Bıçak pointed out, highlighting the need for both legislative and institutional reforms to ensure that advances in surveillance and AI remain accountable to democratic principles and the rule of law. “Artificial intelligence is not just a tool. It’s a reflection of values we encode into it,” Bıçak said. “There should always be legal guarantees … ensuring that AI serves justice, not replaces it, undermines it, and certainly not automates its erosion.”
At the Caglayan courthouse, more than 100 people pressed against the closed courtroom doors, waiting for them to open. It was mid-April, and Onur was one of over 90 defendants set to stand trial — one of the two initial cases stemming from the March protests. Like most of those arrested, he had since been released from pretrial detention.
Inside the courtroom, Onur, like nearly all the defendants, did not deny that he attended the protest. Among those on trial were seven journalists, charged alongside mostly young people. They, too, were accused of participating in the protest and had to convince the court that their presence was purely for professional reasons. Their case was eventually separated.
“For the cases of journalists, they intentionally selected pictures where their equipment wasn’t seen,” Batıkan Erkoç, a lawyer with the Media and Law Studies Association (MLSA), told New Lines, echoing others’ concerns about the lack of transparency over the evidence against the defendants. “There is just one photo for each defendant that we have seen. We don’t have the video in the case file,” he said ahead of the trial.
“We don’t know how the police are working right now because we cannot see the investigation file, and this applies to all of the people arrested,” said Mina Sik, a young lawyer who is defending one of the students.
The chaos was reflected in the tense courtroom. At the start of the proceedings, lawyers raised objections over the court’s legal authority to hear the case. When the judge refused to hear them, the room broke into chants of “There is no salvation alone, either all of us together or none of us,” one of the slogans of the protest — highlighting mutual responsibility for collective well-being as opposed to individual survival. Even one of the journalists, purportedly here to convince the court their presence at the protest was indeed to carry out professional duties, couldn’t help but join in the chant, which filled the courtroom and the sterile corridors of the courthouse.
The air was stuffy, the air conditioning was off and it was an unusually warm day in an otherwise cold spring. The microphone didn’t work properly, and a murmur of discontent rose from the back of the room, where journalists and other observers were unable to hear the defendants’ statements.
“The indictment contains no substance and no evidence,” one defendant declared, just before the microphone cut out again. From the back of the courtroom, a woman snapped, shouting at the judge that it’s the court’s duty to ensure the proceedings run properly. For the umpteenth time, the room descends into chaos. The hearing is eventually adjourned.
Although this doesn’t apply to everyone on trial, Onur is convinced he became a target due to his known political views.
“About a year ago, I was on the streets protesting against the ‘kayyum’ policy in the east of Turkey,” he said, referring to the replacement of several Kurdish mayors with trustees appointed by the government over alleged links to terrorism. He said he remembers talking about democracy with a person who considers themselves a democrat.
“He said it was an anti-terrorist operation, that it had nothing to do with democracy and that it would never happen in Istanbul,” he recounted. “Well, now, I would like to see that person again.”
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