Switzerland continues to deport rejected asylum seekers to Turkey, despite warnings that some of them are imprisoned upon arrival.
This is the final part of our series on tightening removals. Across all three editions, the margin of protection has been narrowing. Serious risks after return are increasingly treated as manageable, and evidence of what is likely to happen is placed behind legal thresholds that are very difficult to meet.
In Turkey, that risk can become a prison cell within hours.
What happened recently
Bahar Yalçınkaya had lived for almost two years at the Ober Halden return centre in the canton of Zurich, together with her five-year-old daughter and her 15-month-old baby, who was born in Switzerland. On 4 August 2026, the police came to deport them. According to a witness, officers restrained her hands behind her back in front of her children before taking the family away.
On arrival in Istanbul, Turkish authorities detained her. A court ordered her pretrial detention on suspicion of “propaganda for a terrorist organisation”, and she was transferred to a closed prison with her baby. Her five-year-old daughter was separated from her and reportedly placed with an acquaintance.
The accusation arose from social media activity connected to Kurdish political expression. Reporting on the case describes posts concerning the imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan, the Kurdish Newroz festival and the Kurdish movement. Her lawyer, Murat Özten, states that he warned the Swiss authorities before the removal and provided records showing an active criminal case in Turkey and an order for her apprehension. The removal went ahead regardless. What happened to her in Istanbul was foreseeable before the plane left Zurich.
Kurdish expression and Turkey’s counter-terrorism laws
For decades, the Turkish state has approached the Kurdish question primarily as a matter of security. Human Rights Watch reports that hundreds of Kurdish activists, former members of parliament, mayors and party officials have been imprisoned or sentenced on terrorism charges for non-violent political activity, speeches and social media posts. Kurdish journalists have also been disproportionately targeted by terrorism prosecutions.
The European Commission’s 2025 report on Turkey found that the overall human rights situation had deteriorated. It recorded intensified investigations, prosecutions and convictions of journalists, lawyers, academics, human rights defenders and other critical voices for alleged support of terrorism, and concluded that the politically motivated and overly broad use of counter-terrorism law continues to undermine fundamental freedoms and the rule of law. Amnesty International reaches the same conclusion, noting that Kurdish activists and politicians remain imprisoned for legitimate, non-violent political activity and speech.
The European Court of Human Rights has repeatedly found violations where Turkish courts treated political expression as terrorist propaganda without adequately demonstrating incitement to violence. In Üçdağ v. Turkey, the conviction was based on two Facebook posts. The Court held that the domestic authorities had failed to balance freedom of expression against the security aims they invoked, and found a violation of Article 10 ECHR.
When criticism becomes a criminal offence
Two criminal provisions are particularly relevant: “insulting the president” and “terrorist organisation propaganda.”
💡“Insulting the president”
Article 299 of the Turkish Penal Code makes insulting the president a criminal offence, punishable by up to four years in prison. In 2021 alone, more than 11,000 people were prosecuted under Article 299, according to the latest figures published by Turkey’s Ministry of Justice
💡“Propaganda for a terrorist organisation”
Article 7(2) of Turkey’s Anti-Terrorism Law criminalises “making propaganda for a terrorist organisation” and provides for one to five years’ imprisonment. The provision is particularly controversial because of its broad scope.
UN human rights experts have repeatedly warned that the vague wording allows for arbitrary or abusive application and can criminalise freedom of expression, including the work of journalists and human rights defenders.
In Turkey, a statement, social media post or journalistic activity can become the basis for criminal proceedings even where it does not involve or advocate violence.
The consequences of such proceedings extend well beyond the charge itself. In 2024, the UN Committee against Torture found that torture and ill-treatment continue to occur in Turkey in a generalised manner, including beatings and sexual assault by law enforcement and intelligence officers, and that people can be held for extended periods without judicial oversight. Turkish law allows police to deny a detainee access to a lawyer for up to 24 hours, precisely the period in which the risk of abuse is highest, and police officers have been present during detainees’ medical examinations, making injuries difficult to document.
In 2025, seven women reported being strip searched and beaten at the Anti-Terrorism Branch of the Ankara police. In prison, people held on terrorism charges face punitive strip searches, prolonged solitary confinement and delayed or denied medical treatment, and Turkey does not allow independent organisations to monitor its prisons.
The Human Rights Association recorded 20 suspicious deaths in places of detention in 2025. Children are not spared: 891 children under the age of six currently live in Turkish prisons with their mothers, and 78 percent of them show signs of developmental delay.
What Swiss law requires
A distinction between legitimate prosecution and political persecution is necessary. An arrest after return by itself does not automatically prove that a person has suffered persecution within the meaning of refugee law.
For persecution to be recognised as relevant for asylum purposes, the prosecution must appear illegitimate. That includes cases where the offence is falsely attributed to the person, the penalty is disproportionate, the proceedings fall short of the rule of law, or enforcement risks violating human rights. The illegitimacymust also be based on one of the grounds protected under refugee law. These are the legal principles the State Secretariat for Migration (SEM) is required to apply.
Under the European Convention on Human Rights, the assessment must focus on the foreseeable consequences of removal in light of both the general situation in the destination country and the person’s individual circumstances.
What changed in Switzerland
In November 2024, the Federal Administrative Court (FAC) ruled that a Turkish asylum seeker under investigation in Turkey for “insulting the president” or “propaganda for a terrorist organisation” doesn’t qualify as a refugee in Switzerland on that basis alone. Turkish asylum seekers now have to show that the investigation is likely to lead to charges, that the charges are likely to lead to a conviction that sticks, and that the conviction would punish them for their political opinion or another protected ground, with a sentence harsh enough to count as persecution.
On paper, this means the SEM assesses each case individually. In practice, applicants are asked to predict how a foreign criminal process will unfold, and the main evidence they have is the Turkish investigation file itself. The SEM often does not trust the provenance of those files. In the same case, it questioned the Turkish records on the grounds that standardised documents are easy to forge or obtain through bribery.
This reflects a wider pattern in which the SEM often presumes that documents such as Turkish arrest warrants are forged and therefore doesn’t examine them on their merits. It points to features it says are missing or inconsistent with authentic documents, but won’t explain which ones, so applicants have no real way to understand or challenge the assessment. Someone can submit a genuine investigation file or apprehension order and still be told it’s unreliable, or that the proceedings are too early to count. Waiting for the case to progress isn’t an option either. By the time the evidence is strong enough for Switzerland, the person may already be in the hands of the authorities they fled.
The Swiss Refugee Council has criticised this direction, pointing out that Switzerland keeps tightening its approach to Turkish asylum claims even though the human rights situation in Turkey hasn’t meaningfully improved.
What worries us
In December 2025, SRF Investigativ documented at least twelve cases of people being detained after return. All twelve people had referred to pending cases for political offences in their Swiss asylum procedures. All were arrested or imprisoned after being returned to Turkey.
At the same time, returns have increased sharply. SEM figures reported in August 2026 show that 113 rejected Turkish asylum applicants were returned in 2024 and 214 in 2025.
There is also no systematic monitoring after arrival. The WOZ reported that the SEM does not generally conduct systematic post-return checks or evaluations of people’s situations in their countries of origin. It has acknowledged knowing of individual cases involving detention after return, but says its examination did not establish politically motivated persecution.
Removal decisions are justified through predictions about what is likely to happen after return, but the state does not collect the information needed to test those predictions. The cases that are known today exist because lawyers, journalists, families and civil-society organisations traced what happened after the person disappeared from the Swiss procedure.
The thread running across this series
This series began with recognised refugees returned to Greece, where access to housing and basic support exists on paper but remains out of reach in practice. It continued with Afghanistan, where a man may be considered returnable because he is young, healthy and has relatives, regardless of the reality of life under Taliban rule. It ends with Turkey, where an investigation may be dismissed as too preliminary to establish danger even when an apprehension order exists, and where people have subsequently been detained on arrival.
In each case, protection narrows because the conditions on the ground go unrecognised. A theoretical entitlement is treated as though it were access to shelter, a family network as though it were a functioning protection system, and a statistical probability is given more weight than the evidence in a person’s own file.
A fair asylum process must consider what is likely to happen to a particular person, returned to a particular place, at a particular time. Legal representation is often what ensures that this question is asked before a plane leaves. Lawyers can obtain and assess foreign court records, document an individual’s political profile, present new evidence to the authorities, request the suspension of a removal and, where the strict legal requirements are met, ask international human rights bodies to intervene.
This is the work AsyLex does. When a risk is reduced to a file number or dismissed as too uncertain, careful legal work can bring the person behind the case back into view.
That’s the end of this three-part series. Greece, Afghanistan, Turkey. Three very different places, but the same pattern underneath: protection that exists on paper getting hollowed out in how it’s actually applied. We wanted to lay that out case by case because it’s the kind of shift that rarely makes headlines, it just happens, decision by decision. Thanks for reading along.