A new “judicial reform” threatening to criminalise LGBT people in Türkiye is being met by protests from young people, the left, women and LGBT people.
The autocratic regime of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his ruling AKP party are notorious for their reactionary policies. In January, 2025 was announced as the “year of the family,” including advocating that each woman should have three children.
The judicial reform, currently a draft law proposed to be decided before the end of the year, makes behaving or arguing contrary to “public morality” illegal. There is an urgent need for massive protests involving all opposition to the government.
The recently proposed 11th Judicial Reform Package in Türkiye is not merely a technical reorganization of the judicial system, it carries the potential to deeply affect personal freedoms and even the basic survival of LGBT people.
With vague and ideologically charged terms such as “public morality” and “biological sex,” this package risks turning legal definitions into instruments of control that interfere directly with the fabric of our communities and the well-being and survival of individuals.
As a socialist and activist for democratic rights, I must ask:
Who defines morality? For whom, and according to what standards?
And even more crucially: Whose lifestyle, identity, or body can be deemed a crime?
Singer Risks Prison
Recent investigations opened against the singer Mabel Matiz and the music group Manifest clearly demonstrate how this approach operates in practice. Matiz is under a travel ban and risks three years in prison for “obscenity” in one of his songs.
Prosecuting art in the name of “public morality” does not only target individual artists and their rights, it also strikes at the heart of society’s right to think freely. Art is the conscience of a people. To silence art is to silence that conscience. The government seeks to reshape art, not as a space of free expression, but as a reflection of its own reactionary social order.
By leaving concepts such as “chastity” and “morality” to the conscience of regime-friendly judges, the proposed reform is an attempt to undermine the cultural and social diversity of Türkiye. This is a country where multiple faiths, identities, languages, and traditions coexist. Socialists support the right to free expression, equal rights, and oppose all forms of discrimination and attempts to drive minorities out of public life.
Why Now?
The true aim of these reforms has to be found in the regime’s desperate struggle to keep its power. The purpose is to divide and rule, to whip up reactionary ideas and to intimidate all opposition. Türkiye has thousands of political prisoners and yet the Erdoğan regime is still meeting strong opposition and protests.
With this proposal, definitions of “chastity” and “public morality” will be established by the personal value judgments of individual judges. Such a system undermines the principle of equality before the law and exposes personal freedoms to arbitrariness.
Also, the emphasis on “biological sex” strengthens policies that erase LGBTQ+ existence. This approach enforces a narrow binary to “live like a woman” or “appear like a man” and seeks to institutionalize conservative social norms such as “a real man behaves this way; a real woman behaves that way.”
But the length of one’s hair, the tone of one’s voice, the color of one’s clothes, or one’s body or relationships should not be matters for the state, they are matters of personal expression.
Under such a legal regime, we could face absurd yet frightening realities:
- A person legally married to a same-sex partner abroad could be penalized for sharing wedding photos on social media under the pretext of “violating public morality.”
- Individuals could be judged and punished for being “too feminine,” “too masculine,” or for having a “voice or appearance that doesn’t fit” traditional expectations.
If a judicial reform threatens the right to individual self-expression, then it is not a reform, it is a mechanism of oppression. Today, those silenced in the name of “public morality” may tomorrow be criminalized for their thoughts, their clothing, their relationships, or even their voice.
The real “public morality” of this country is corruption, injustice and the system itself.
Struggle Against the Government and the System
Democratic rights are a result of mass struggles by the working class and the oppressed, pushing through the right to organise, strike and demonstrations, as well as rights for the oppressed, women, LGBT people, and national minorities. These rights are threatened as long as the capitalist system exists, clearly shown today in Türkiye and globally with the ruling classes turning to reaction and right-wing populism.
The protests against the 11th Judicial Reform Package must increase, linking up with other strong movements against the regime by trade unions, the political left, women’s protests, students, Kurds and others. Despite the repression, Türkiye has a strong tradition of mass movements.
This is a struggle against the government and the capitalist system. The morality this package seeks to protect does not belong to the people it belongs to power. Our struggle is, and will remain, for our right to survival, our identities, and our freedom.
