On Thursday the Bakırköy Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office announced that it had opened an investigation, of its own motion, into Ekrem İmamoğlu. The subject of the investigation is what he said that day in the courtroom, on the second day of his own defence.

The announcement states that the investigation concerns his statements at the hearing of 15 October 2026 in file 2026/208 before the İstanbul 33rd Assize Court, statements it describes as targeting the members of the judiciary who conducted the investigation underlying the prosecution. The offence named is public insult of public officials on account of their duty. No article of the Criminal Code is cited.

İmamoğlu has been in pre-trial detention since 23 March 2025. On the day the investigation was opened he had been held for 571 days. The trial in which he was speaking opened on 9 March 2026.

Turkish law addresses this situation directly. Article 128 of the Criminal Code provides that where concrete allegations or negative assessments about individuals are made in written or oral applications, claims and defences before judicial authorities, no penalty is imposed, provided the allegations rest on real and concrete facts and are connected to the dispute. The Court of Cassation has applied that provision to a defendant’s own words at his own trial, including remarks calling a complainant’s evidence false, and quashed the resulting conviction.

What İmamoğlu said over the two days was in substance an attack on the indictment. He told the court that the organisation chart set out in it was the İstanbul Metropolitan Municipality’s own staff chart: “My people, this is the İBB’s working template. Whoever is in senior management has been written into the organisation.” He said the municipality had been audited 147 times between 2014 and 2019 and 1,590 times between 2019 and 2025. He asked the court to call Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu as a witness on the purchase of the CHP’s İstanbul provincial building, which the indictment alleges was bought with the proceeds of crime, saying the matter had been explained to the then party leader in his presence.

He gave the court an account of a telephone call. He said that when Akın Gürlek was appointed chief public prosecutor in İstanbul he rang him to arrange a courtesy visit, and that Gürlek told him in a sharp voice that he would “settle it within one or two weeks”, later offered an appointment for 30 October, cancelled it the day before, and carried out the Esenyurt operation on the day the appointment had been set for. This is İmamoğlu’s account, given in court. Akın Gürlek is now Minister of Justice.

Describing the morning of 19 March 2025, when he said hundreds of police came to his house, he asked: “Did you summon us and we did not come? Cowards, you could not even give an appointment, you could not even answer my telephone.”

Those are the words at issue. Reports identify among them “aparat”, “foncular”, “you are being disgraced”, “you are turning into a bankrupt merchant”, “filth is running off every side of you”, a description of the indictment’s authors as tainted, and remarks about the prosecutors who wrote that he was a spy.

The proceedings begun on 19 March 2025 he described as a coup.

Seven weeks earlier, in Kavala v. Türkiye (no. 2), the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights held that the case before it illustrated a systemic problem, part of a wider context marked by the detention and prosecution of political opponents, human rights defenders and journalists, and revealing structural shortcomings in the guarantees of judicial independence.

A defendant who has been held for 571 days without a verdict is required to answer the case against him. On the second day of answering it, a second prosecutor’s office opened a file on the answer.