(Istanbul, November 7, 2024) – The Erdoğan government’s decision in recent days to remove from office four democratically elected mayors and dissolve municipal councils is a significant blow to Türkiye’s democratic credentials and violates the rights of over half a million voters, Human Rights Watch said today. The mayors in four constituencies, one in Istanbul and three in southeast Türkiye, were elected in the March 31, 2024, local elections.
“Denying hundreds of thousands of voters their chosen local government elected representatives and replacing them with the government’s own appointees not only undermines the democratic process, but violates the right to free and fair elections,” said Hugh Williamson, Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “Successive Erdoğan governments have adopted this method before, abusing their powers and smearing mayors with the charge of terrorism.”
On October 30, police detained Ahmet Özer, mayor of Esenyurt, the district of Istanbul with the largest population, from the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP). A court ruled that he should be placed in pretrial detention pending investigation on charges of “membership of a terrorist organization.” The evidence cited against Özer, a university professor who is Kurdish, includes phone calls years earlier to people whom the prosecutor alleged faced criminal investigations for links with the armed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) but no allegations that he committed an actual crime.
Since the investigation file is subject to a secrecy order, the full details of the evidence against Özer have not been revealed. On October 31, the Ministry of Interior announced that Istanbul Deputy Governor Can Aksoy had been appointed in Özer’s place and on November 4, the deputy governor dissolved the local council, entrusting the council’s duties to unelected civil servants. This is the first time a CHP mayor has been detained and removed from office in this way.
On November 4, the Ministry of Interior announced that the mayors of Mardin, Batman, and Halfeti in southeast Türkiye, elected from the Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM party), had been removed, citing criminal cases against them on terrorism charges, including convictions still on appeal, an ongoing trial and investigations. This is the third time Mardin Mayor Ahmet Türk, a veteran Kurdish politician, has been removed from mayoral office and replaced with a trustee. On the two earlier occasions he was removed, he ran for office again in the next local elections and was re-elected. The other two mayors are Gülistan Sönük, elected with 64 percent of the vote in Batman, and Mehmet Karayılan, elected in the small Halfeti district of Şanlıurfa province.
In an earlier case, the police on June 2 detained the Hakkari mayor, Sıddık Akış, and the Ministry of Interior replaced him with the Hakkari governor. On June 5, a court convicted Akış of being a “leading member of a terrorist organization” and sentenced him to 19 years and 6 months in prison. Akış has appealed his conviction.
The Supreme Election Council had not contested the legality of the mayoral candidacy in any of the five cases, nor prevented them from assuming office after they had been elected.
Protests against the removal of the mayors followed in many cities, with violent police dispersal, multiple arrests, and video footage from Batman of police officers beating and ill-treating demonstrators they had apprehended.
The problematic amendment to the Municipalities Law (no.5393) that permits the removal of mayors, deputy mayors, and council members for alleged terrorism links (Articles 45, 57) was introduced by an emergency decree and then made law under the state of emergency which the Erdogan government imposed after the July 2016 attempted military coup.
While the law provides that a council member should be chosen to replace a mayor who has been removed as a temporary measure, in past cases the government has instead permanently appointed the most senior public official in the province or district—the governor, deputy governor, or the district governor—to be the “trustee” in place of the mayor.
In these cases, in violation of the law, the appointed trustee governor or district governor has either dissolved the local council or has never permitted it to convene, completely taking over running the municipality and removing all its elected representatives.
Previous Erdoğan governments removed elected mayors and took over municipalities in 2016 and 2019 in the Kurdish southeast.
In 2016-2017, the largest crackdown on Kurdish opposition politicians, the government removed and jailed mayors, among them the Mardin mayor Ahmet Turk, and appointed trustees to run 94 municipalities. Gültan Kışanak, the then mayor of Diyarbakır, spent over seven years in prison before her release in May 2024.
The arrest and removal of mayors was matched by the detention from November 4, 2016, onward of elected members of parliament, including Selahattin Demirtaş and Figen Yüksekdağ, who have remained in detention for eight years despite European Court of Human Rights judgments ordering their immediate release. The European Court has ruled that the members of parliament were wrongfully stripped of their parliamentary immunity and detained without reasonable suspicion for a politically motivated purpose.
In August 2019, after the March 31 local elections that year, the government again deployed the strategy of taking over Kurdish municipalities, removing and replacing with trustees the elected mayors of Diyarbakir, Van, and Mardin before going on to replace other elected mayors in the southeast, appointing trustees in 48 municipalities out of 65 won by the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP).
“The removal of mayors and dissolution of local councils and their substitution with Ankara appointee ‘trustees’ should be reversed immediately and elected incumbents restored to office unless they have been convicted in an independent court of law of an internationally recognized crime,” Williamson said.
