Istanbul's notorious criminal judge, Akın Gürlek, has been promoted to the Ministry of Justice by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. This is according to a decree published in the Official Gazette on Thursday. With the appointment, Gürlek will assume the post of deputy justice minister with immediate effect. The opposition is angry.

Gürlek is considered a loyal henchman of Erdoğan and is known as the "executioner in robes". He was the preferred choice for politically highly explosive trials and handed out long prison sentences. In 2018, Gürlek sentenced the Kurdish politician and former chairman of the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), Selahattin Demirtaş, to four years and eight months in prison for "propaganda for a terrorist organization." Filmmaker and former HDP deputy Sırrı Süreyya Önder received a three-and-a-half-year prison sentence in the same trial. The sentence against Istanbul CHP Chairwoman Canan Kaftancıoğlu of nearly ten years in prison on various charges, including "terror propaganda," fell under Gürlek's jurisdiction in 2019. Last May, Turkey's top appeals court agreed to convict her on three charges. She is to be behind bars for four years, 11 months and 20 days. The sentence carries a five-year ban from politics. On Tuesday, Kaftancıoğlu was in Silivri prison and was released the same day under supervision.

Also in 2019, Akın Gürlek sentenced seventeen lawyers from the Association of Progressive Lawyers (ÇHD) to prison terms ranging from two years and 15 days to 18 years and nine months in the absence of the defendants and in camera. Ebru Timtik, one of the convicts in the ÇHD trial, died in August 2020 as a result of a month-long hunger strike for a fair trial. Less than three weeks after her death, the Court of Cassation overturned Timtik's sentence.

In 2020, Akın Gürlek ensured that the well-known exiled journalist Can Dündar was declared a "fugitive" and his assets seized. That same year, he refused to implement a decision by Turkey's Constitutional Court on a verdict against CHP politician Enis Berberoğlu. Berberoğlu was imprisoned between June 2017 and September 2018 - when he was a member of parliament. He had initially been sentenced to 25 years in prison for betraying secrets, but in a retrial in February 2018 the sentence was reduced to five years and ten months. The politician was accused of leaking secret information to the anti-government newspaper "Cumhuriyet", which allegedly proved Turkish arms supplies to Islamists in Syria in 2014.

In the parliamentary elections in June 2018, Berberoğlu was re-elected as a deputy for the CHP for five years - from prison. The Constitutional Court ruled unanimously last January that Berberoğlu's imprisonment violated his right to personal freedom and his right to engage in political activity. The court had already ruled last September that Berberoğlu's rights had been violated and that the case should be reopened. However, a lower court in Istanbul, with Gürlek presiding, refused to implement it.

In June 2020, Berberoğlu was stripped of his deputy mandate at the same time as Kurdish HDP deputies Leyla Güven and Musa Farisoğulları because of a final verdict. He was subsequently arrested again, but then released and placed under house arrest due to the pandemic. The ruling did not apply to Güven and Farisoğulları.