Deniz Nas of the 3H Movement talks to Vinayakan Sajeev Beena about Türkiye’s crackdown on LGBTI+ organisations, why the argument has to be won in Türkiye before it can be won anywhere else, and what European liberals can realistically offer.
On 12 September 2026, Turkish police began a coordinated operation across 15 provinces under the title ‘My Family is Safe’. The Ministry of Justice announced that it covered 162 suspects, nine associations, and 13 businesses. Among the organisations raided were Kaos GL, Pembe Hayat, SPoD, and the HIV organisations Pozitif Yaşam and Pozitif-İz. Human Rights Watch recorded 112 people arrested in the first three days, of whom 82 were remanded in custody. Deniz Nas, 23, is a board member and International Officer of the 3H Movement, Türkiye’s liberal youth organisation.
From outside Türkiye the raids of 12 September looked sudden. Did they look sudden from Ankara?
No. The turn came with the Gezi Park protests in 2013, the largest protests against the Erdoğan government, and LGBTI+ people took part in them. Before Gezi, Erdoğan had been building relations with LGBTI+ people, against the Kemalists and against the nationalists, because the structures of military tutelage still shaped Türkiye's politics and the AKP needed alliances across broad segments of society. That is the context for the 2010 referendum, which amended the constitution the 1980 junta had written, stripped the coup leaders of their immunity, and allowed officers to be tried in civilian courts. Some LGBTI+ people took the position of 'not enough, but yes' on it. After Gezi he cut those relations off. The serious restrictions came after the coup attempt was defeated in 2016 and, above all, after the 2017 referendum, which replaced the parliamentary system with a presidential one and greatly expanded the president's powers. From there the pressure fell on almost every excluded group at once: Kurdish people, non-Muslims, women's rights, and LGBTI+ rights. The associations and media organisations have been blocked on social media and the web, and their budgets cut off.
Yıldız Tar of Kaos GL was detained in February 2025, in an operation presented as one against the Kurdish movement. What did that case show?
On the surface that is what it was. Yıldız Tar is an editor at Kaos GL, the largest LGBTI+ media organisation in the country. But a great many LGBTI+ people and activists in Türkiye belong to the Kurdish political parties, first the HDP and now the DEM Party, which is the largest party in parliament that accepts LGBTI+ people without reservation. So an operation aimed at those parties reached the LGBTI+ movement as well, and a large number of LGBTI+ people were arrested in it. The operation was announced as one thing and worked as another.
You were abroad on 12 September. How did you find out?
I was in the Netherlands at a LYMEC event, which I regret. Our president, Zülfü Hayat Çınar, was in Türkiye. She went to the Pembe Hayat office in Ankara and to Kaos GL to stand with them, and then to the Çağlayan courthouse in Istanbul, where those arrested were taken. Other board members in the country did the same. When I got back I went to the Pembe Hayat office myself.
What has changed since then for the people around you?
They are more frightened every day. The government wants to show that Turkish conservatism in Türkiye is rising, and the concept it keeps returning to is the family. 2025 was declared the Year of the ‘Family’, and it was during that year that LGBTI+ people were arrested. Nothing has been announced for 2027, but these operations are called ‘My Family is Safe’ and the emphasis is getting stronger, so I expect the family to be used again next year to increase the pressure. I am not optimistic.
The government says the operations protect children and the family. Is there anything in that argument that deserves an answer?
The contradiction is the answer. Most conservatives and nationalists in Türkiye cannot see LGBTI+ people inside a family at all, and I do not think they want to. You see the same reflex in the hostility to Netflix, which they dislike because there are gay and trans people in its films and series. We are not counted as members of a family here. There is no marriage for us, there is no right to adopt a child, and the group rights that would make any of this possible have never been established in Turkish law. We could form families of our own. The state shuts us out of the family, then accuses us of destroying it.
Two HIV organisations, Pozitif Yaşam and Pozitif-İz, were raided alongside the campaigning groups. If they cannot work, who is left delivering HIV services in Türkiye?
The municipalities do a great deal of it. Voluntary Counselling and Testing Centres, or services like them, were opened by Çankaya in Ankara, by Şişli and Beşiktaş in Istanbul, by Konak in İzmir, and by Nilüfer in Bursa, and the model has since spread to a dozen others, most recently Kadıköy. They offer free testing with counselling before and after, and they keep people's identities confidential. Every one of those municipalities was held at the time by the CHP, Türkiye's social democratic party. These centres are usually presented as social municipalism, as social service provision, and neither I nor my colleagues in the association read them that way. They were built at a point when people's rights were being curtailed under the pretext of HIV and sexually transmitted disease, and what those mayors did was work out their own answer to it. As far as I know they are still running.
The government calls the LGBT+ movement a foreign agenda. How old is it?
LGBTI+ people have always lived in Türkiye, but they were not organised. It became political in the 1980s, when the postmodern turn in Europe reached us. The first institutional organising happened around the first Green party, and leftist groups brought it into politics. You can see it in the art, cinema, and music of that period. The Freedom and Solidarity Party was the first to put LGBTI+ rights into a party programme, and the Kurdish political movement brought LGBTI+ people into politics seriously. SPoD, the largest LGBTI+ association in the country, was founded on 21 September 2011, mainly by liberal LGBTI+ activists.
Almost every Turkish liberal backed the AKP in its first decade. What do you say about that now?
Before the AKP and Erdoğan came to power, Türkiye faced a significant problem: the military junta. The military maintained its own courts and various other institutions that effectively operated as a parallel state. During that period, socialists, Kurds, liberals, conservatives, non-Muslims, Alevis, and the LGBT+ community in Turkey were frequently suppressed and subjected to persecution. AKP leaders, meanwhile, championed a conservative yet liberal identity; they cultivated strong ties with the West and articulated rhetoric that challenged the prevailing state regime. Consequently, they sought to reach out to and embrace all the segments of society that the then existing regime had marginalized. With the exception of "Republican liberals," virtually all liberals of the era supported this new wave. When the AKP was founded, Erdoğan supported the LGBTI+ movement because it suited his aims. He was trying to change the Turkish regime, and he reached out to the groups the state had excluded: LGBTI+ people, Kurds, religious conservatives. Almost all Turkish liberals supported him in that period, whether they were left liberals, conservative liberals, or centre right. The Republican liberals, who are close to the social democrats, never did. When Gezi happened, the collaboration ended and the pressure began. It was always conjunctural.
3H wrote LGBTI+ rights into its programme in 2006. What has the movement done with that since?
We have stood with the movement since then, and these rights were in our association programme from the founding. We have joined every Pride march. Our president launched Buradayız, We Are Here, a mobile application mapping which streets are safe for women and LGBTI+ people, run with municipalities including Üsküdar, Maltepe, and Eyüpsultan, though it is no longer operating. We put these questions on the programme of our Liberal Youth Congress and our summer camp every year, because most young people in Türkiye do not know what LGBTI+ rights are. For this reason, the 3H Movement Association has consistently voiced the discrimination faced by LGBT+ individuals and taken a firm stand against it.
Who was Bulut Öncü, and why does the 3H Movement honour his memory with an annual award?
He was one of our members, and among the best known LGBTI+ activists in the country, working at Kaos GL and at the Community Volunteers Foundation. We lost him on 20 February 2017. Every year at our Liberal Youth Congress we give the Bulut Öncü Award in his name, to whoever has done most for human rights that year.
Do other Turkish liberal organisations take the same position?
Some do. The Freedom Research Association supports LGBTI+ rights in its agenda. Others, on the conservative liberal side, do not reject those rights outright but ignore them, and ignore the discrimination that goes with them. Some of them cannot even bring themselves to mark 8 March, International Women’s Day, and are opposed to marking it. I am not going to name them, because I do not want to single anyone out. They know who they are.
What does a liberal argument offer here that the left does not already provide?
In my view the Turkish left approaches LGBTI+ rights through economic and class equality, while liberals put the emphasis on individual freedom and on securing equal rights through institutional reform, including the right to marry and the right to adopt. The left does not work on the institutions in that way. There is also a difference of method. Confrontational rhetoric from some on the left leaves people hearing the movement as hostile to their own families, and that alienates the very people whose support we need. I think acceptance can be built through dialogue, education, and legal reform, day by day. Not a revolutionary way. An evolutionary way.
You argue that European liberals frame this wrongly. How?
Most European and American liberals reduce LGBTI+ movements to human rights, on the view that basic rights already contain them. That is not sufficient. Liberalism mostly considers individual rights, and individual rights can overlook group rights. We follow Will Kymlicka and Iris Marion Young on this. In the Turkish constitutional context these have to be counted as group rights, because LGBTI+ people and women do not hold equal status with heterosexual Turkish men in the marketplace, in the constitution, or in public life. That status was never established equally in the first place.
Ipsos finds that 51% of people in Türkiye support protecting lesbian, gay, and bisexual people from discrimination at work and in housing. Is that the country you live in?
Honestly, no. In my experience most people support the pressure, in schools, in public life, in society itself. Where it is true is in the universities, the most progressive space in Türkiye, and among my own generation, who are becoming secular and do support these rights. Older and middle aged people mostly do not. So the division is generational, and also between the big cities and everywhere else.
Support for legal recognition of same-sex couples has fallen from 43% in 2021 to 32% this year. Is that the campaign working?
It works in both directions at once, and it creates a dilemma in society. Among secular, socialist, and liberal people in the big cities, and among the younger generation, it produces the opposite of what it intends. Among older people, and in the small cities and the rural areas, it works for Erdoğan. It is like America in that respect.
What can European institutions realistically do?
The European Parliament and European civil society try to support us, but it is mostly theoretical, and I do not think they have many other options. What would help is education and projects inside Türkiye about what these rights are, because a great deal of the discrimination is unintentional. People do not know what LGBTI+ rights are, who LGBTI+ people are, or even the language to talk about it. Contact changes that.
If LYMEC member organisations asked what to send, what would you tell them?
Money can be sent, and as an association we want the projects we run with LGBTI+ organisations to have European financial support, and we accept the risk that carries. But understand what the risk is. The nature of these operations is that money received by LGBTI+ associations gets seized. So my own view, personally rather than for 3H, is that money is not always the solution. What would help now is a joint declaration of support from LYMEC and its member organisations, issued together with 3H. That would be enough, and it costs nobody here their safety.
The European Commission concentrates on the cases of Osman Kavala, Selahattin Demirtaş, and Ekrem İmamoğlu. Where do LGBTI+ cases sit?
Outside that list. Those cases matter and the Commission is right to press them. But it can affect this too, and it can put it on its agenda, and LGBTI+ cases should be on it. As I said, the commission’s focus on these cases is a very appropriate stance, and I support it. After all, Selahattin Demirtaş has been unjustly imprisoned for nearly ten years, while Kavala and those detained in connection with the Gezi protests have been held without cause for nearly nine years. Nevertheless, the commission needs to focus more on the rights violations faced by LGBT+ individuals in Turkey and bring this issue to the forefront; in the current climate, LGBT+ individuals and children are the most vulnerable groups in the country.
You are speaking under your own name while the prosecutions are live. Why?
It is a risk for me and for the 3H Movement, and I know that. But we would like to change something in Türkiye, and in the Middle East and in Eastern Europe, and that is our motivation for this interview. People living in Europe should know what is happening here.
Interviewer:
Vinayakan Sajeev Beena is Editor-in-Chief of Libertas, online magazine of LYMEC (European Liberal Youth).
This interview was conducted in English and has been edited for length and clarity. The views expressed are Deniz Nas's own and do not necessarily represent the positions of Libertas, of LYMEC, or of the interviewer.
Co-Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or European Commission. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
‘The state shuts us out of the family, then accuses us of destroying it.'