On Sunday an Istanbul judgeship remanded two university students in custody. Nehir Dizdar, who studies political science at Galatasaray University, and Nevin Tekin, of İstanbul University, had hung a banner on the railings of Kadıköy Lisesi before a visit by the Minister of National Education. It read: “If we have no future, you will have no peace. Yusuf Tekin, resign!” The judgeship held that “you will have no peace” was a threat against the minister, and that judicial control would be insufficient.

On Tuesday evening students gathered in Beşiktaş Square to protest against that decision. They carried the same words on placards.

In the early hours of Wednesday, police went to four students’ homes and took them away. Three of the four study at Galatasaray University. They were questioned through the night, brought to the courthouse at Çağlayan, and released under judicial control — required to report for signature, and forbidden to leave the country.

The grounds, according to their lawyers, are violation of Law No. 2911 on Meetings and Demonstrations. The material cited is what was written on their placards. Three slogans are named: that the MESEMs should be closed and the order that kills should be brought down; that revolution will clean up this filth; and “if we have no future, you will have no peace.”

The last of those is the sentence that put Dizdar and Tekin in prison. Four more students were taken from their beds for writing it on a piece of card at a protest about their imprisonment. The offence, on this reasoning, reproduces itself each time anyone objects to it.

But it is the first slogan that deserves the attention, because it is a factual claim about dead children, and it can be checked.

MESEM is the state’s vocational training centre programme, which places school-age students in workplaces alongside classroom instruction. In June, answering a written question in the Grand National Assembly, the ministry reported that since 2016 there had been 3,080 workplace accidents involving MESEM students, of which 13 were fatal. In September, Minister Tekin gave figures for 2025 and 2026 alone: 9,950 accidents, and 37 students dead.

Thirteen deaths in nine years, and then thirty-seven in two. Both sets of figures come from the same ministry. No correction to either has been reported. The İşçi Sağlığı ve İş Güvenliği Meclisi, which does its own field research because it does not rely on the ministry’s, puts the figure at at least 20 MESEM students killed at work since 2023.

The same body recorded that at least 95 children under the age of 18 died at work in Türkiye during the 2025–2026 school year, up about 32 percent on the 72 of the year before. Twenty-eight of them were between five and fourteen years old.

That is what the placard was about. Nehir Dizdar, in custody, said she had been defending her right to criticise the deaths of children enrolled in MESEM.

Her mother, Zübeyde Duran Dizdar, a retired teacher, put the question that the week has not answered. “Which law says a minister cannot be criticised? Which law says a minister cannot be protested against?”

Dizdar and Tekin were released on Wednesday, after three days in prison. The four students were released the same day, under conditions. The two Sözcü editors detained on Monday night, over a headline that described the first two students as high-school pupils when they are undergraduates, were released after giving statements at three in the morning.

Within five days, eight people were taken from their homes at night in connection with a bedsheet tied to a school fence. None of them is accused of violence. The minister whose resignation it demanded has told parliament two different things about how many children have died in his programme, and has been asked about neither.