COMMENTARY: Turkey arrests 225 people before the NATO summit — and its allies look away

A night of June 22–23 that says a great deal

In the night of June 22–23, 2026, Turkish authorities arrested at least 209 people in Ankara. Lawyers, activists, academics, journalists — including Yıldız Tar, a journalist and LGBT rights activist — and 14 members of the TEMA foundation, an environmental organisation specialising in reforestation. Dozens of others were placed in pre-trial detention. The official reason invoked by the Ankara prosecutor's office: "deciphering the actions and activities of terrorist organisations." The real reason? The NATO summit in Ankara, scheduled for July 7–8, 2026, was approaching. And the Turkish government wanted clean streets.

According to data published by Human Rights Watch on June 25, 2026, a total of 225 people were arrested in this operation. Of those 225, the courts placed 178 in pre-trial detention, put 34 under house arrest, and released only 6. The rest languished in a legal grey zone. And the day before the mass arrest, the Governor of Ankara had already banned all public demonstrations, the distribution of leaflets, and the display of banners — from June 28 to July 10 — deploying 70,000 police officers. This is not security. It is political sterilisation.

The documented silence of the allies

Reuters, in an article published on July 1, 2026, documents it soberly: NATO allies chose to remain silent about this wave of repression. The relationship with Ankara, described as "transactional" by anonymously cited diplomats, takes precedence over any human rights consideration. Turkey, NATO's second-largest army, controls the Bosphorus Strait, hosts essential American military bases, and plays an intermediary role in negotiations with Russia. In other words: it is too valuable to criticise. This calculation is understandable. It is also morally corrosive.

Benjamin Ward, deputy director for Europe and Central Asia at Human Rights Watch, did not mince his words: "The abusive use of anti-terrorism laws to organise mass arrests and silence people on the eve of a NATO summit runs counter to the Alliance's founding values." He demanded the immediate release of detainees and called on NATO to insist that peaceful expression be permitted. His voice echoes in a void. Allied capitals, busy preparing their speeches on democracy and freedom, said nothing.

I cannot look at this silence without unease. NATO is a military alliance, certainly — but it has always claimed to be a community of values too. What Turkey is doing in Ankara is the exact opposite of those values. And the fact that no one says so out loud should make us all collectively ashamed.

Imamoglu in prison, CHP decapitated, media muzzled

The repression preceding the summit does not emerge from nowhere. It sits within a longer trajectory. The mayor of Istanbul and the main opposition candidate for the presidency, Ekrem Imamoglu, was arrested and indicted — effectively excluded from Turkish political life by court order. The leadership of the main opposition party, the CHP (Republican People's Party), was ousted by court injunction. Dozens of journalists face abusive prosecutions for critical reporting or social media posts. At the time of writing, at least 21 journalists are incarcerated in Turkey.

In June 2026, Turkish authorities ordered the blocking of X (formerly Twitter) accounts of LGBT and women's rights organisations — including organisations providing services to victims of domestic violence. These blocks came as LGBT groups were preparing gatherings for Pride Month. Journalists from recognised independent media — Cumhuriyet, Sozcu, T24 — were denied accreditation for the NATO summit, according to Reuters on June 25, 2026. Dozens of reporters were excluded from coverage of an event taking place in their own capital.

Terrorism as a universal label

The legal tool of Turkish repression is always the same: anti-terrorism laws. Broad, vague, infinitely extensible, they allow the arrest of a TEMA foundation tree planter as readily as a lawyer defending an activist or a journalist documenting injustice. The terrorism designation in Turkey has become a tool of political management — a means of criminalising dissent without passing through the category of "repression." Amnesty International had denounced this dynamic well before the summit: it described it as an "unjustifiable attack" on freedom of assembly and expression.

One man died during the operations of June 22–23 — shot by police as a suspected link to the Islamic State. Human Rights Watch called for an independent investigation into the circumstances of his death. This demand, like the others, will likely go unanswered as long as NATO's allies prefer discretion.

The terrorism label has become the universal solvent of Turkish politics. No matter what you do — plant trees, defend prisoners, photograph an arrest — if it inconveniences the government, you are a terrorist. And no one in Brussels says a word.

Turkey is too valuable to criticise

The reasoning behind Western silence is transparent. Turkey controls the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits, the strategic lock between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. It hosts Incirlik Air Base, used by American forces. It is the only NATO country to maintain active diplomatic relations with Moscow while remaining in the Alliance — an intermediary role that enabled, among other things, the Black Sea grain transit agreements in 2022–2023 and negotiations on Ukrainian prisoners of war. Ankara is, in diplomatic parlance, "indispensable."

This pragmatism has a history. NATO has always had to accommodate members who did not fully respect its declared values. Greece under the colonels, Portugal under Salazar, Turkey after the military coups of 1960, 1971, and 1980. The Alliance's logic has always been that the strategic umbrella takes precedence over the democratic agenda. But there is a threshold beyond which this calculation becomes an endorsement. And arresting 225 people to clean the streets before a summit crosses that threshold.

What silence says to autocrats the world over

The problem with Western silence goes beyond Turkey. It sends a global message: democracies silence their values when strategic interests come into play. This message is read in Moscow, in Beijing, in Tehran. It is read by every government that monitors how Westerners react — or do not react — to human rights violations among their allies. And what they see is considerable room for manoeuvre. If Turkey, a NATO member, can arrest 225 opponents without triggering the slightest public reaction from its allies, what signal does that send to regimes that do not enjoy this strategic protection?

The question is not to punish Turkey or threaten its place in the Alliance. The question is to say, out loud, in front of cameras, what is happening. Benjamin Ward said it. HRW said it. Amnesty said it. Democratic governments stayed silent. And this collective silence carries a cost — for the moral credibility of the West, for the 178 people in pre-trial detention in Ankara, and for all those who still believe that democracies keep their promises.

When democracies stay silent on mass arrests among their allies, they validate everyone who says their freedom rhetoric is empty. I have no simple solution to offer. But I refuse to pretend this silence is acceptable.

A military alliance that also claims to be democratic

NATO was founded in 1949 around two axes: collective defence against Soviet aggression, and commitment to democratic values enshrined in its preamble. These two axes have always been in tension. Collective defence requires reliable allies, not necessarily model democracies. And since 1949, the Alliance has regularly chosen strategic reliability over democratic consistency. But there is a difference between tolerating imperfections and endorsing systemic regression.

What Turkey under President Erdogan represents in 2026 is more than an imperfection: it is a deliberate slide toward a model of governance in which opposition is criminalised, independent media muzzled, and public gatherings banned on demand. In this context, hosting a NATO summit in Ankara without uttering a single reservation about the conditions under which it is held sends a powerful message — the wrong one.

Ukraine is watching, and it understands

There is a cruel irony in this picture. Ukraine has been fighting since 2022 for its right to exist as a democracy. Its soldiers are dying for an ideal that many others in this same West they defend seem ready to sideline the moment strategic interests enter the frame. Zelensky, who aspires to join NATO, must watch the treatment afforded to Turkish dissidents and ask himself: exactly what Alliance would he be joining? An Alliance of democracies — or an alliance of naked geopolitics?

This question is not rhetorical. It shapes the long-term legitimacy of NATO as a political project. If the Alliance cannot hold its member allies to a minimal standard of respect for fundamental rights, it loses what distinguishes it from other purely transactional security pacts. And that distinction — that moral surplus — is precisely what has allowed it to survive 75 years of crises.

Zelensky is fighting to join NATO. But the NATO convening in Ankara in July 2026 accepted without a word the caging of 178 people in its host city. That contradiction cannot be resolved with speeches about democracy.

Underlying tensions: Trump, Erdogan, and the future of the Alliance

The Ankara summit of July 7–8, 2026 is taking place against a backdrop of multiple tensions within the Alliance. Donald Trump, back in the White House, has repeatedly reminded European allies that they must shoulder a greater share of the defence burden. He has called some members "free riders" on American security. In this context, NATO's ability to impose governance standards on its members is even weaker than usual — because the agenda is dominated by defence budgets and cost-sharing, not human rights.

President Erdogan, for his part, knows exactly how to leverage his position. He negotiates his support for NATO candidacies — as he did for Sweden and Finland — against concessions on bilateral issues. He plays both sides: formal ally of the West, commercial partner of Russia, self-proclaimed mediator of regional conflicts. This ambiguity gives him enormous leverage — and makes him very difficult to challenge publicly.

70,000 police: a staging, not a security measure

The deployment of 70,000 police officers in Ankara for the summit is, in itself, a message. It says: this city is under control. It says: no one will come to disrupt the official narrative. It tells accredited journalists — those who were authorised, not the Cumhuriyet and Sozcu reporters who were excluded — that they will cover what the government chooses to show them. It is a perfect staging of the modern police state: no visible truncheons on television, but dissidents have been in cells for two weeks.

Amnesty International denounced this apparatus as an "unjustifiable attack" on freedom of assembly. The Governor of Ankara decreed a ban on all public demonstrations from June 28 to July 10 — twelve days of total prohibition in the capital of a country of 85 million people. And no allied capital officially protested. Not even for form's sake.

70,000 police officers for a summit that talks about democracy. The dissonance is so glaring it would be comical — if 178 people were not in prison during that time.

When complicity becomes routine

There is a threshold, in the relationship between democracies and their authoritarian allies, where silence ceases to be discretion and becomes a form of complicity. This threshold is never crossed clearly, never officially. It is crossed drop by drop, arrest by arrest, journalist exclusion by journalist exclusion. And one day, looking at the whole, one finds that democracies have slowly normalised practices they claim to condemn in their adversaries. Russia imprisons journalists: global scandal. Turkey imprisons 21: polite silence. The difference is the NATO badge.

This double standard has real consequences. It weakens Western credibility in international forums where human rights are debated. It gives ammunition to Russian and Chinese propaganda, which quickly points to the contradictions of democracies. And it betrays the thousands of Turks — journalists, lawyers, activists, teachers — who resist, day by day, an authoritarian drift, hoping that their Western allies will not abandon them. These people exist. And they see this silence.

The limits of the transactional

The transactional relationship with Turkey has a logic. It also has limits. By constantly making concessions on values to preserve strategic interests, Western democracies risk draining the meaning from the very structures they defend. NATO is not only a military defence pact: it is also — or at least it was — a community of states sharing fundamental values. If one allows this dimension to erode without reaction, the result is a purely military Alliance, without a moral compass, guided solely by the calculus of immediate interests. That would be a victory for Putin, who has always dreamed of seeing democracies betray themselves.

Turkey plays this tension expertly. It knows its allies need it. It uses that to push the limits. And every time allies fall silent before a new wave of repression, the bar shifts a little further. In 2026, that bar now stands at 225 arrests before a summit, with zero reaction. Where will it stand in ten years, if nothing changes?

There is no transactional relationship without morality — or rather, when the transactional crushes morality, it ends up destroying the value of the relationship itself. Ankara's allies should bear that in mind.

HRW, Amnesty: the counter-power of NGOs

In this governmental silence, non-governmental organisations played their traditional role: speaking truth when diplomats keep their mouths shut. Human Rights Watch published its report on June 25, 2026, documenting the arrests with precision: names, professions, dates, court proceedings. Amnesty International described the crackdown as "unjustifiable." These organisations have no armed divisions or diplomatic levers — but they have the credibility of rigorous testimony, and that is precious.

The problem is that their influence on democratic governments has diminished. In the current political environment, dominated by the rise of populism, hybrid threats, and a security obsession, HRW and Amnesty reports are more easily ignored than they were twenty years ago. Governments know that media coverage will be brief, that public opinion will move on, and that strategic allies — Turkey foremost among them — will still be there tomorrow. That is the cynicism of our age, and it is thriving.

The excluded journalists: censorship by accreditation

The denial of accreditation to journalists from Cumhuriyet, Sozcu, and T24 deserves particular attention. These three publications are among the few independent media still active in Turkey, resisting constant pressure. Excluding them from the NATO summit in their own capital is not a logistical detail: it is an openly political form of censorship. And the fact that foreign delegations did not publicly demand the presence of these media — or at least did not make that demand public — says much about the state of press freedom as a diplomatic priority in 2026.

A journalist excluded from a summit in their own city, for political reasons, with the silent endorsement of twenty-nine allied democracies: that is the true balance sheet of Western diplomacy in Ankara that week. Official communiqués will speak of unity, solidarity, deterrence. They will not mention Yıldız Tar in detention, nor the TEMA foundation reforesters who planted no trees this month.

A free press is the last bulwark against abuses of power — including among allies. To let it be excluded without protest is to accept that the summit takes place in a theatre whose backstage has been cleaned out. That is not NATO. That is stagecraft.

A NATO candidacy facing the Alliance's hypocrisy

Zelensky wants to join NATO. He has repeated it in every speech, at every summit. Ukraine meets conditions that Turkey no longer meets: free elections maintained even in wartime, a pluralist press working under bombardment, a civil society of remarkable vitality. And yet it is Ankara at the table, and Kyiv knocking at the door. This irony has a practical dimension: it tells Ukrainians that NATO membership does not depend solely on democratic excellence. It depends on the geopolitical calculation of existing members. That calculation can change. But it does not change by magic: it changes under pressure.

This is why what happens in Ankara in July 2026 should be read by Kyiv as a warning, not a model. Ukraine does not want to join an Alliance that looks the other way when its members arrest reforesters. It wants to join an Alliance of values — and for that to be possible, this Alliance must first recover its own. These are two linked battles. Refusing to see them as such is to court a future disappointment.

Pressure as the only language understood

Human rights organisations have lent their voice. The independent media that managed to cover the events did their job. One question remains open: will a coalition of democratic governments ever say publicly to Ankara that this level of repression is unacceptable? Not buried in a communiqué between twenty paragraphs, but clearly, at the press conference, in front of cameras? The answer for now is no. But precedents exist — the European Union has, in the past, been capable of conditioning trade relations on advances in fundamental rights. That mechanism is not dead. It is simply dormant.

Turkey knows exactly what it is doing. Each arrest is a test of its allies' tolerance. 225 people arrested, zero public reaction: the measurement has been taken. Next time, the number could be higher. That is how red lines disappear — not by official decision, but by silent erosion.

Ukraine deserves a NATO that keeps its promises. For now, it is watching an Alliance that bends before Erdogan with a smile. That spectacle gives it no confidence — and it would be right to have none.

Values are not optional

I am not asking NATO to expel Turkey. I am not asking its members to sever diplomatic relations with Ankara. I am asking for something simpler, and harder at the same time: the truth. To say publicly, in the name of allied democracies, that mass arrests on the eve of a summit are unacceptable. That denying accreditation to independent media goes against the Alliance's values. That silence is itself a form of complicity.

This statement is possible. It would not destroy the Alliance. It would not endanger Incirlik Air Base or control of the Bosphorus. Democratic governments have mechanisms for saying uncomfortable things to their allies while maintaining functional relationships. What they lack is the political will to do so. And this absence of will, in 2026, before a Turkey that incarcerates its opponents in its own capital in front of world cameras, is a moral capitulation that should not pass without a word.

The 178 people in cells deserve to have their names spoken

The war in Ukraine brought the defence of democracies back to the top of the agenda. It showed what indifference to authoritarianism costs — in Ukrainian lives, in destruction, in the displacement of millions. That lesson should inform our gaze on what is happening in Turkey. The 178 people placed in pre-trial detention in Ankara in June 2026 are not war victims — but they are victims of the same principle: that a power can crush opposition when it judges its political survival demands it. And that the democracies around it prefer to stay silent.

The NATO summit in Ankara, July 7–8, 2026, will produce communiqués, handshakes, and photos of smiling leaders. In a few days, Yıldız Tar may still be in prison. Cumhuriyet journalists will not have covered the event in their own capital. And the allies, for their part, will speak of unity and freedom. That is the paradox that slowly kills the credibility of the West — and it deserved to be named.

Ankara's balance sheet cannot be reduced to official photographs. It also amounts to 178 pre-trial detentions, journalists excluded from their own capital, and the chosen silence of democracies that should have spoken. That silence — I refused to contribute to it.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist

Editorial stance

I am not a journalist but a columnist and analyst. My expertise lies in observing and analysing the geopolitical, economic and strategic dynamics that shape our world. My work is to take political strategies apart, to understand global economic movements, to put the decisions of international actors in context and to offer analytical perspectives on the changes that are redefining our societies.

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