Lawyer Murat Akkoç said tens of thousands of people have been jailed in Turkey on accusations created after the July 15, 2016 coup attempt from conduct that was not previously defined as a crime.
Akkoç, who closely follows ByLock cases, made the remarks during a live broadcast on Moonstar TV, where he answered questions from Turan Görüryılmaz about post-coup prosecutions targeting alleged links to the Gülen movement.
The Gülen movement is a transnational civic initiative inspired by Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen.
Ankara designates the movement as a terrorist organization and blames it for the coup attempt. The movement denies involvement in the coup attempt or any terrorist activity.
Akkoç said many accusations used in post-coup cases, including banking activity at Bank Asya and alleged use of the ByLock messaging app, had no basis as criminal offenses under the Turkish Penal Code before July 15.
He argued that the government retroactively turned lawful activity into evidence of terrorism.
According to Akkoç, people were punished not for concrete criminal acts but for being perceived as affiliated with the Gülen movement.
He said ordinary banking transactions were treated as criminal evidence for some defendants while similar transactions by others were removed from prosecution lists.
Akkoç claimed that records involving people close to the ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, as well as transactions by the Ministry of Finance, AKP-run municipalities, depositors and customers, were excluded from Bank Asya-related accusations.
“People affiliated with the AKP and those the political administration favored were removed from the lists of individuals facing ByLock and Bank Asya accusations,” Akkoç said.
Bank Asya, once one of Turkey’s largest participation banks, was associated by Turkish authorities with the Gülen movement, seized by the state before the coup attempt and later shut down by government decree.
After July 15, prosecutors frequently cited deposits, accounts or transactions at the bank as evidence in cases targeting alleged movement links.
ByLock, an encrypted messaging app, has also become one of the most widely used grounds in post-coup prosecutions.
Turkish prosecutors treat alleged ByLock use as evidence of membership in the Gülen movement, while defense lawyers challenge the reliability, collection and interpretation of the data.
Akkoç said the broader legal problem began with the blanket designation of the Gülen movement as a terrorist organization and continued with the conversion of lawful activities into criminal accusations.
His remarks reflect a central criticism of post-coup trials: that prosecutors rely on affiliation indicators, such as bank accounts, app-use allegations, employment history and social ties, rather than individualized evidence of criminal conduct.
