Turkey’s war on free expression and the courage of Enes Hocaoğulları
By jailing a youth delegate for speaking at the Council of Europe about police violence, Turkish authorities have shown how far they will go to punish dissent. But Enes Hocaoğulları’s case is also a rallying point, part of a broader pattern of censorship and intimidation that Turkey’s LGBTI community has faced for years, yet continues to resist with courage and creativity.
Enes Hocaoğulları, 23, a youth delegate to the Council of Europe, was arrested at Ankara airport on August 5. Turkish authorities say he “spread misleading information” and “incited public hatred” after he spoke in Strasbourg about police violence and the arrest of elected mayors back home. His comments quickly became the target of a coordinated smear campaign, painting him and his organisation ÜniKuir as agents of “moral corruption” and “foreign influence.”
Enes’ case is being closely followed by European institutions and rights bodies. At the time of writing this blog, the court has accepted the indictment and rejected the lawyers’ appeal. His first hearing is set for 8 September, and he will remain in detention until then. He is currently being held in Sincan prison in Ankara.
You can track the developments in Enes’ case in our live updates timeline.
A shrinking space for dissent
This is not an isolated event. Since the shift to an executive presidential system in 2018, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has concentrated political power in his own office, the courts have lost much of their independence, and the space for journalists, activists and minority communities has steadily shrunk. Officials often justify new restrictions by claiming to protect “national values”, “the family” or “children”. This language has become a cover for broad censorship of LGBTI content and activism.
These limits are enforced through a combination of restrictive laws, heavy-handed regulators and targeted policing. The 2022 “disinformation” law criminalised spreading “false” information online, a vague provision that can be applied to political dissent. The Council of Europe’s Venice Commission had advised Turkey not to adopt this law, as it found it to “neither be ‘necessary in a democratic society’ nor proportionate to the legitimate aims of prevention of disorder and protection of national security, of health and of rights of others”, and therefore running contrary to Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) – the article ensuring the right to freedom of expression.
Long before that, the Radio and Television Supreme Council (RTÜK) and the Ministry of Family and Social Services were already policing cultural content. In 2020, RTÜK (Radio and Television Supreme Council) fined TLC for showing LGBTI parents, ordered Netflix to pull a show with queer characters, and pushed for the removal of a children’s book for allegedly “encouraging homosexuality”. That same year, parliament tightened control over social media, a move criticised by human rights groups as a blow to one of the last relatively open spaces for political debate.
From censorship to criminalisation
These measures have only intensified. In 2021, rainbow flags and LGBTI slogans were banned from Women’s Day marches in several cities. The British young adult novel Heartstopper was sold in sealed envelopes labelled “Harmful for children” after an obscenity ruling. Hornet, a popular LGBTI dating app, was removed from the Turkish App Store. In 2022, Netflix was fined for featuring queer characters in Jurassic World Camp Cretaceous, and Disney’s Strange World was banned outright.
Censorship extends beyond media. In 2024, the Constitutional Court struck down the Hornet ban as a violation of free expression, but this win was overshadowed by new restrictions. The Ministry of Family and Social Services classified three LGBTI-themed books as “obscene”, a concert was cancelled after a political hate campaign, and in 2025 the website of LGBTI group KaosGL was blocked under “family” and “child” filters without notice. Between January 2023 and mid-2024, RTÜK issued more than half a million lira in fines for LGBTI-related content while at the same time airing anti-LGBTI rallies as public service announcements.
This crackdown has gone hand-in-hand with arrests of other prominent LGBTI activists and journalists. In February 2025, Yıldız Tar, Editor-in-Chief of KaosGL.org, was detained alongside dozens of others in a mass operation, facing accusations of “membership in a terrorist organisation”. Tar has since been released pending trial but remains under judicial control. These cases reflect a growing strategy of criminalising LGBTI human rights defenders and silencing independent media.
Resistance against the odds
Taken together, these actions reveal a clear pattern: the expansion of legal tools to punish dissent, the use of state bodies to remove LGBTI visibility, and the reliance on morality-based rhetoric to justify both. Enes’s arrest fits squarely within this environment. The same political machinery that targets cultural products, online platforms, and peaceful assembly is now being used to silence a young activist for speaking at an international forum.
Despite everything, Turkey’s LGBTI community continues to take to the streets for Pride each year, facing bans, arrests and police violence. Our Turkey Pride Monitor documents how activists persist with creative resistance, even under heavy state hostility.
We call on international actors to raise these ongoing rights violations in all engagements with the Turkish government, and on donors to increase support to civil society on the ground. Most urgently, we join ÜniKuir in calling for the immediate release of Enes Hocaoğulları and for his right to free expression to be upheld.
