EU Parliament Names Turkey's Top Judge for Sanctions — Days Before Erdoğan Hosts NATO Summit
Brussels brands Ankara "fully authoritarian," targets the prosecutor who jailed Erdoğan's rival, and documents Turkey's Hamas ties and pressure on EU member states
The European Parliament has adopted its harshest resolution on Turkey in years, calling on the EU's foreign-policy chief to consider sanctions against Justice Minister Akın Gürlek — the former Istanbul chief prosecutor who jailed President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's leading rival and now oversees the country's judiciary.
The June 17 text declares Turkey is consolidating into a "fully authoritarian" state, landing at an extraordinary moment: Ankara hosts NATO's heads of state on July 7-8, and in November it chairs the UN climate summit while freezing out an EU member state. Building on reporting by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the resolution is also a rare institutional record of what a NATO ally's support for Hamas looks like in writing and what Brussels is willing to say about it.
The Prosecutor Who Became Justice Minister
The official Parliament singled out is Akın Gürlek, who as Istanbul’s chief public prosecutor issued the detention warrant for Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu and filed a 4,000-page indictment seeking up to 2,430 years in prison on 142 charges of corruption and organized crime. İmamoğlu was detained on March 19, 2025 — the morning his Republican People’s Party nominated him as presidential candidate — alongside 43 others, with no charges yet filed. The European Court of Human Rights has accepted İmamoğlu’s application under its priority procedure. Erdoğan then elevated Gürlek to justice minister in February 2026, a post that also makes him chair of the Council of Judges and Prosecutors — leaving him supervisor of the judges now hearing the very cases he built.
Gürlek’s record stretches back further: he served as presiding judge in proceedings related to the 2007 murder of Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink. The Parliament resolution calls Gürlek “a key actor in the state’s repressive machinery” who “has always been a political actor following a political agenda.” The sanctions call, passed 381 to 107 with 171 abstentions, is non-binding but urges EU foreign-policy chief Kaja Kallas to weigh asset freezes under the bloc’s Global Human Rights Sanctions Regime.
What Brussels Put on Record About Hamas
The resolution documents what Parliament calls Turkey’s “active support” for Hamas, an EU-listed terror group, and faults Ankara for never condemning the October 7 attack.
The text separately condemns Turkish support for Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated networks and the far-right Grey Wolves movement, and denounces attacks on the country’s Jewish, Christian, and Alevi minorities. Those findings were adopted one week after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu branded Erdoğan an “antisemitic dictator” who backs Hamas.
Squeezing Two EU Member States
The resolution arrives amid escalating pressure on Greece and Cyprus. In May, Ankara unveiled draft legislation to codify its “Blue Homeland” maritime claims across the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean — sweeping territorial demands that overlap with zones claimed by both EU member states. Turkey continues to obstruct the EU-funded undersea power cable linking Israel, Cyprus, and Greece, a project Turkish officials warned requires Ankara’s permission in contested waters.
As host of November’s UN climate summit in Antalya, Turkey has frozen Cyprus out of preparatory meetings — even though Nicosia currently holds the rotating EU Council presidency and represents all 27 members. The EU called the exclusion “not acceptable.” A February “calm waters“ summit between Erdoğan and Greek Premier Kyriakos Mitsotakis has slowed none of the pressure. Parliament rapporteur Nacho Sánchez Amor stated that Greece and Cyprus remain inseparable pillars of any future EU-Turkey relationship.
A NATO Ally Brussels Calls Authoritarian
The resolution carries no legal force; any sanctions listing requires unanimous agreement among the EU’s 27 governments. But its timing sharpens a contradiction the West has avoided: in three weeks, Erdoğan hosts NATO’s heads of state; in November, he chairs a UN summit while snubbing an EU member.
The Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Sinan Ciddi has urged Washington to use the NATO gathering to tell Erdoğan that threats against Greece and Cyprus are unacceptable. The deeper question Parliament has now forced into the open is how an alliance of democracies hosts, funds, and relies on a member its own legislature has just declared authoritarian.
What this article really gets to is the insanity of overriding what leaders who have totalitarian ambitions say by extending democracy to them. This is wholly based on a philosophy that democracy, economic abundance, and sharing democratic norms changes behavior from cultures that have no desire nor ambition to integrate into Western societies.
The EU is a joke. They still think Erdogan is a rational, democratic actor. The guy literally said he would use the train of democracy until he was ready to get off. Does the Western mind not understand this and what that means?
Just like every country the West that mass imports Muslims and extends democracy to them, nothing good comes of it: nothing. Turkey is the template. Lebanon is the template. Now the UK is the template of what capitulating to Muslims does to society and culture: it destroys it. The West and former Christian and secular countries surrender to Islam without fail.
This is not about demonization of Muslims: it's about the idea systems they carry into Western societies. If you don't know how that works, I suggest reading "Israel, Islam, and the West" by Dan Burmawi - a former devout Muslim now a Christian - risking his life in the West to bring a message about the true nature of importing Islam into the West means.
I'm sorry to say that the United States is on a cataclysmic path that the UK has followed. Politics are downstream of culture but culture is also downstream of politics.
So long as demonization of Israel (stand in for Jews) is considered legitimate and normalized, society and policy inevitably moves towards the very groups that will one day erase them too.
The saddest part? Most people are silent or do not see the civilizational threat. We are seen as too negative and detached from reality on the ground.
I refuse to accept that. The Jews placed in ghettos by the Nazis could not have imagined their eventual destination were the gas chambers.
Instead of ghettos, there is the balkanization of the West: parallel societies, Sharia laws, Sharia courts, and no go zones.
This is not about the West being asleep. It's about whether they have the courage to understand that peace is often won through war: that could mean kinetic or policy changes tethered to reality to preserve our liberties: not negotiations in fancy hotels and in conferences. Treaties and agreements are only meaningful when the opposing side has either been decisively defeated, deterred, or compelled to comply. Without that underlying power, a signed document is just paper.
The West understood this in WWII. Unlike what VP Vance has said, wars are not won through negotiations. We won against Fascist Germany and Imperial Japan through overwhelming force and bombs and the public was willing to sacrifice comforts at home for it. They understood this was a moral imperitive and in war, innocent people always die. But the West understood back then that this resulted in less human costs - which it did. More human lives were saved by stopping these death cults. We now apologize for it.
That spirit of courage, of confidence, and of moral clarity left the West. We replaced it with paralysis and miasma: reducing every act of evil as the product of poverty, mental illness, or lack of education. What madness we have surrendered to.
Turkey’s autocratic president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, y"sh, is a fanatical Islamist. He hates Israel, which he would like to defeat militarily. He provides Hamas and other terrorist organizations with a safe haven and a financial base, and issues Turkish passports to terrorists. For years, he has been funding anti-Semitic propaganda films,
Furthermore, he is a supporter of the notorious Muslim Brotherhood(lums).