Turkey Arrests Dozens of LGBTQ+ Activists Outside Istanbul Courthouse
A sustained Turkish government campaign against LGBTQ+ assembly and venues has now produced multiple waves of arrests within days, testing the limits of civil society response in a NATO member state.
Turkish police arrested dozens of people on Tuesday outside Istanbul's main courthouse, according to BBC News. The detainees had gathered to protest the earlier arrests of a separate group of LGBTQ+ activists who were taken into custody over the preceding weekend.
The weekend arrests were carried out in a series of raids on gay bars and at the private homes of activists, according to the same BBC report. The courthouse demonstration on Tuesday, intended as a public call for the release of those weekend detainees, resulted in a second, larger wave of arrests by Turkish security forces.
The Turkish government has maintained a formal ban on Pride marches in Istanbul since 2015. Authorities have consistently cited public order and security concerns when justifying restrictions on LGBTQ+ public gatherings, according to public statements documented by Human Rights Watch in prior years.
Turkey is a member of NATO and a candidate country for European Union membership, though accession negotiations have been effectively stalled since 2018. The European Parliament has in past sessions cited democratic backsliding, including restrictions on civil society and minority rights, as factors in those stalled talks, according to European Parliament resolution records.
The current crackdown follows a pattern documented by international human rights organizations over the past decade. Amnesty International has recorded a progressive tightening of restrictions on LGBTQ+ assembly in Turkey since the Istanbul Pride ban was first imposed by the Istanbul Governorate in 2015.
The identities of the individuals arrested on Tuesday had not been fully confirmed in available public reporting as of the time of publication. It is also not yet known whether formal criminal charges have been filed against either the weekend detainees or those arrested at Tuesday's demonstration. Court records or official government statements would clarify the legal basis for the detentions.
Turkey's Interior Ministry had not issued a public statement on the arrests that was available in English-language sources at the time of this report. The BBC report did not include comment from Turkish government officials.
The arrests drew attention internationally because they occurred in Istanbul, Turkey's largest city and a major commercial and cultural hub, rather than in smaller or more conservative regions of the country. Istanbul's municipal government, led since 2019 by Ekrem Imamoglu of the opposition Republican People's Party, has at times expressed different positions from the national government on social issues, though municipal authorities do not control police operations, which fall under the Interior Ministry.
Imamoglu himself was convicted in March 2025 on corruption charges in a case his supporters characterized as politically motivated, according to Reuters reporting at that time. His removal from office and the broader political climate surrounding that case had already drawn international criticism of Turkey's judicial independence before the current wave of LGBTQ+ arrests.
The speed with which a protest against one set of arrests produced a second set of arrests in the same week marks an escalation in the tempo of enforcement actions, though whether this reflects a formal policy directive or operational decisions by local police commanders is not established in current public reporting. Statements from the Interior Ministry or official government communications would be needed to determine that.