“Love is love, and no one should be prosecuted for being who they are,” says Mathias De Clercq, President of Eurocities and Mayor of Ghent. “What’s happening in Türkiye is an attack on freedom of expression and association, on the basic democratic right to organise. European cities have to stand on the side of the people defending those freedoms.”
LGBTQI+ communities under attack in Türkiye
On 13 September 2026, coordinated police and gendarmerie operations swept across 15 Turkish provinces, raiding the offices, homes and gathering places of LGBTQI+ organisations. Judicial proceedings have been opened against 162 individuals, nine associations and thirteen businesses. The day before, a court in Istanbul ordered the blocking of websites and social media accounts belonging to 73 organisations and activist groups.
No law against being LGBTQI+ has been passed. Instead, Turkish authorities are reaching for existing offences – obscenity, facilitating prostitution, forming an organisation for criminal purposes – and applying them to organisations that have operated openly and legally for years. Lawyers representing those detained report that phones were searched without judicial authorisation, and that private messages and photographs recovered from them were then used as evidence. The investigations reportedly began with unauthorised monitoring of social media accounts, a method Türkiye’s own Constitutional Court has already ruled unlawful.
This is not a one-off. Pride marches have been effectively banned in Türkiye for a decade. Access to gender-affirming healthcare for people under 21 has been restricted in practice. Further legislation is reportedly being prepared that would allow LGBTQI+ associations to be shut down outright. These raids show that the existing legal system is already being used to reach the same end.
Why Eurocities is speaking up
“We call for an immediate end to these operations and for the release of all those who have been detained,” says Jaume Collboni, Vice President of Eurocities and Mayor of Barcelona. “Not one step back in the defence of rights and against attacks on the LGBTI+ community, in Türkiye and anywhere else in the world.”
What's happening in Türkiye is an attack on freedom of expression and association, on the basic democratic right to organise.
Eurocities has visited Istanbul on two delegations, and on both occasions our mayors made a point of meeting the local LGBTQI+ community to hear directly about their situation and to stand with them. When Hungary moved to ban Pride marches, Budapest’s mayor held the march anyway, and mayors from across Europe stood by that decision. The principle is the same wherever it happens: when a government uses the law to close down public space for a minority, every city that believes in equal rights has a stake in the outcome.
Eurocities will keep raising the situation of LGBTQI+ people in Türkiye with our members and with our partners in the EU institutions, and will keep supporting the mayors and cities already engaged on the ground.
When one community’s freedom is at risk, it is a warning for everyone’s.
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Photo by Hadi Yazdi Aznaveh on Unsplash
