ISTANBUL: A trial of nearly 200 people, among them students and journalists, arrested over Turkiye’s biggest protests in more than a decade opened in Istanbul on Friday.

In the dock are 189 suspects who were rounded up in a government crackdown on the protests, which erupted following the March 19 detention and subsequent jailing of Istanbul’s opposition mayor Ekrem Imamoglu.

As the trial opened, the Caglayan courthouse was packed with family members, journalists, university lecturers and lawmakers from the main opposition CHP party, an eyewitness said.

Most of the defendants were students, but among them were also eight Turkish journalists — including agency’s photographer Yasin Akgul — who had been covering the biggest wave of street protests to grip Turkiye since 2013.

The suspects are facing a number of charges, notably “taking part in illegal rallies and marches” and “failing to disperse despite police warnings,” court documents show. If convicted, they could face between six months to four years behind bars, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a statement.

Addressing the court on behalf of the journalists, lawyer Veysel Ok called for their acquittal on grounds they were reporting the news of the protests. “They were there as journalists to cover the protests… that’s what they are paid for,” he told the judge.

The judge rejected the acquittal request but agreed to separate their file from that of the students. According to the indictment, their claim to be journalists “has not been counted” because the police did not establish that they were present for journalistic purposes, HRW said.

“We want the journalists to be acquitted” because they are being tried on the basis of false evidence, Erol Onderoglu, the Turkiye representative of Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said. “Unfortunately, their prosecution is as arbitrary as their detention and arrest.”

‘Justice for our children’

For most of the youths, it was the first time they had joined a protest, as large-scale rallies have been largely non-existent since a government crackdown on the 2013 Gezi Park protests. “We want justice for our children. They need to be at their desks in university, not in prison,” Avni Gundogdu, co-founder of The Parents’ Solidarity Network, said outside the court.

The Istanbul prosecutor’s office said 819 people will be tried in 20 criminal investigations. After reviewing nine indictments involving 650 defendants, HRW criticised the “rushed nature and mass scale of the trials,” saying the charges “lack evidence of criminal wrongdoing”.

“Given the glaring absence of evidence, it is hard not to conclude that the intended purpose of these rushed trials is to send a warning against exercising the rights to peaceful protest or free expression,” said HRW’s Europe and Central Asia director Hugh Williamson.

Istanbul’s jailed mayor is President Erdogan’s greatest political rival, and his arrest sparked protests that spread across the country.

Published in Dawn, April 19th, 2025