An Ankara court has issued arrest warrants for 103 people charged with “membership in a terrorist organization,” the Office of the General Prosecutor in Ankara announced. The suspects are among 225 people who were detained earlier this week; 32 individuals were released.
According to the newspaper Cumhuriyet, among those arrested are several members of the Turkish environmental group Tema and the editor-in-chief of Kaos GL, the LGBT+ rights organization, Yildiz Tar. Tar, a queer activist, has previously spent months in detention along with other opposition figures. Others were placed under house arrest. On Tuesday, police raided and arrested more than 200 people, including unionists, lawyers, and left-wing activists. In total, 241 suspects were sought by police.
The arrests are being seen in connection with the upcoming NATO summit, which is scheduled to take place in Ankara on July 7–8. The Ankara Governor’s Office had issued sweeping bans on demonstrations, and numerous downtown streets were to be closed for the duration of the summit. The EU’s Turkey rapporteur, Nacho Sánchez Amor, criticized the arrests on X: when an authoritarian government hosts a summit, it leads to the arrest of more than 200 people as part of a so-called “preventive” operation.
“The arrest of Yildiz Tar is not an isolated judicial decision. It is another link in a chain of political repression that has long targeted human rights defenders, journalists, the feminist movement, the LGBT+ movement, and the democratic opposition,” wrote Turkish LGBT+ organizations in a joint statement. The government is using security policy as a tool to curb fundamental rights and freedoms and is trying to criminalize social and political dissent.
Demonstrations and the X Ban
Demonstrations and downtown closures also apply to the Sunday-planned Istanbul Pride, which the government-controlled governor’s office has routinely banned since 2015, often deploying police to suppress gatherings and make arrests. Activists have recently organized spontaneous protests at various spots across the city. Last weekend, several people were detained at Trans Pride in Istanbul and Ankara Pride.
In the past week, Turkish authorities also blocked dozens of channels run by Turkish LGBT organizations on the social network X; the platform, run by the company backing “censorship-busting” policies, complied with the orders so that the organizations could no longer be accessed domestically. Earlier bans already applied to Kaos GL’s website and X account.
Rising Repression
In recent months, prosecutions against queer activists as well as a gay singer have increased (TheColu.mn reported); state television has warned of “Rainbow Fascism” in a documentary series (TheColu.mn reported), and media regulators are stepping up actions against queer content (TheColu.mn reported).
Activists are also worried about a policy package that has been repeatedly announced and postponed, which would threaten queer “propaganda” with prison terms and restrict medical care for transgender people, along with the reintroduction of forced sterilization (TheColu.mn reported). President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has frequently voiced anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, previously declared 2025 the “Year of the Family” and, in a speech, identified the queer community as a major threat to families; that stance has since evolved into a claim of a “decade of the family.”
