Münir Korkmaz, spokesperson for the KHK Platforms, was detained in Adana on the morning of 9 November 2026 after police raided his home. Ahmet Erkan Yiğitsözlü, editor of KHK TV, was detained the same morning in Ankara. Both were taken to Osmaniye, where the investigation is being run by the Osmaniye Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office. Neither man lives there. No authority has stated the grounds for the detentions, the offence alleged, or the scope of the investigation.

Korkmaz is a class teacher. He was dismissed from the teaching service by Decree-Law No. 675, published in the Official Gazette on 29 October 2016, and has not been reinstated in the ten years since. A member of Eğitim Sen who had held positions in the union, he became one of those who organised dismissed public servants in Adana, led the founding of the Adana KHK Platform in October 2018, helped establish KHK TV, and sat on its broadcast board. He is a member of the Green Left Party’s central executive board.

In the local elections of 31 March 2019 he was elected to the Çukurova municipal council as a CHP candidate. The Supreme Election Council withdrew his certificate of election on the ground that he had been dismissed by decree. He was removed from his profession by decree, then prevented from taking a seat he had been elected to for the same reason, and has since spoken on behalf of others in that position.

On 8 November 2026, the day before he was detained, Korkmaz addressed the DEM Party’s Adana provincial congress and called for those dismissed by decree to be reinstated “without ifs, buts or omissions”.

Yiğitsözlü edits KHK TV, which reports the circumstances and the legal claims of those dismissed by decree. How many times he has been detained is disputed. TR724 reports Monday’s detention as his fifteenth. His lawyer, Hatice Yıldız, said she believed it was his seventh. Yiğitsözlü himself wrote on 5 January 2025 that police had come to his door and he was being detained for the fourteenth time, while convalescing from surgery and with a trial of his own pending. No public record reconciles the three figures, and the state publishes no count of how often it detains the same journalist.

The dismissals these two men organise around were reviewed by the Inquiry Commission on State of Emergency Measures, which by its own account had decided all 127,292 applications before it as of January 2023: 17,960 accepted and 109,332 rejected, a rejection rate of about 86 per cent. Korkmaz is among those never returned to their post.

Ömer Faruk Gergerlioğlu, a DEM Party MP, said the detention of “Münir Korkmaz and Ahmet Erkan, who are conducting a struggle for rights, is unacceptable” and that “we will not stay silent in the face of this unlawfulness”. Sezai Temelli, also a DEM Party MP, called the detentions “an open attack on the public’s right to receive information and on working people’s struggle for justice”, and called for both men to be released.

Ten years after a decree removed him from his classroom, the man who speaks for those the decrees removed was taken from his home to a province he does not live in, for reasons no authority has given.

Note on terms. A KHK is a decree with the force of law; the roughly 125,000 public servants removed from their posts by such decrees after July 2016 are referred to in Türkiye as KHK’lılar, those subject to a decree. A mazbata is the certificate confirming election to office, without which an elected candidate cannot take the seat.