In 2006, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled that Turkish citizen Osman Murat Ulke, who refused to perform compulsory military service as an act of civil disobedience, had been subjected to "civil death" due to the numerous prosecutions he faced after his original jail sentence. Ulke’s expulsion from his profession and the prospect of an interminable series of convictions, which forced him into hiding, constituted a “disproportionate” punishment, the court said.

Many legal experts now believe that thousands, if not tens of thousands, of Turks are potentially in a similar situation in the wake of the July 15 bloody coup attempt. According to officials from the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), 70,000 public servants were dismissed in less than two months after the putsch, while some estimate the figure is more than 100,000. Among them, thousands remain in police custody or have been imprisoned pending trial, but the overwhelming majority of those remaining have not yet faced any questioning related to their dismissals.

Kerem Altiparmak, an Ankara University scholar specializing in human rights, believes a public sector purge on such a scale “is perhaps unprecedented in the world.”

“We are speaking here of tens of thousands people — more than 100,000 people ousted from public service. I’m not sure whether it had reached such numbers even in the entire Eastern European bloc” after the Iron Curtain collapsed, Altiparmak told Al-Monitor.