ARTICLE 19’s Global Expression Report 2025 gives Türkiye a score of 9 out of 100 and ranks it 137th of the 161 countries it covers. Nine falls inside the report’s lowest band, which it labels “In Crisis”.

V-Dem’s Freedom of Expression Index, which measures the extent of free speech and press freedom on a scale of 0 to 1, places Türkiye at 0.179 for 2025, in 152nd position of 179 countries.

The countries immediately around Türkiye in the ARTICLE 19 table are Cambodia at 136th, Rwanda at 138th, Venezuela at 139th, Iran at 140th, Egypt at 141st, the United Arab Emirates at 143rd and Azerbaijan at 144th. At the top of the same table, Denmark scores 94, Switzerland and Sweden 93, Estonia 93, Norway 92 and Belgium 92.

On V-Dem’s scale Türkiye’s 0.179 is the same value as Egypt, slightly above Iran at 0.166 and Cambodia at 0.153, and below every European state in the dataset: Greece 0.810, Bulgaria 0.754, Georgia 0.687, Hungary 0.493, Serbia 0.424.

The two rankings are not independent of each other. ARTICLE 19 builds its score from 25 V-Dem indicators, so both rest on the same expert assessments. What the pairing shows is not two findings but one, expressed on two scales and against two different sets of countries.

Both describe a period that closed before the past five weeks.

In September 2026 the Freedom of Expression Association recorded at least 1,270 X accounts blocked in Türkiye under Articles 8 and 8/A of Law No. 5651. Of those, 941 were blocked in the second half of the month, and around 90 per cent were subsequently withheld from Türkiye by X. The 1,227 accounts whose follower counts could be established had more than 35 million followers between them. The orders came from at least six criminal judgeships of the peace.

On 29 September the İstanbul 1st Criminal Judgeship of the Peace ordered the blocking of the entire T24 news website over 118 items the prosecution characterised as “LGBT propaganda”, together with its social media accounts. On 1 October the account of EngelliWeb, which compiles the only public record of these orders, was blocked and withheld from Türkiye. On 5 October the association that runs it was blocked too, with at least 88 other accounts, among them a retired judge, a psychologist, a software developer, two journalists and a political party.

In the same period the journalists Emre Soncan, Mehmet Yaşar Durukan and Fatih Ergin were remanded in custody within four days, in unrelated investigations.

The Turkish Constitutional Court has already held, in Artı Media Gmbh, that Article 8/A contains no safeguard against arbitrary interference. The orders above were made under it.