What Do the Families at the Ministry of Justice Want?

I Do Not Want to Seek My Right; Give Me My Right

Dear Young Comrades,

Look closely at this sentence: "I do not want to seek my right. Give me my right, so I no longer have to look for it."

Sibel Köksalan said this on 1 September 2026, at the hour of the opening ceremony of the judicial year, in front of the Court of Cassation. A mother who lost her daughter in the wreckage of Trend Garden Residence in Malatya. The sentence looks simple; it is not. Inside it is a complete description of a country's legal order: a right is something that is to be given; but in this country it has been turned into something that must be sought. And the one who seeks is the losing side.

Ten days later, on 11 September, the same families sat down at the door of the Ministry of Justice. Today is the sixth day. This morning the Human Rights Association visited them and published their demands point by point. In this piece I will tell you what those demands mean, who these families are, and why they are at a ministry door rather than in a courtroom. First the news, then the lesson.

Three Questions

Do not answer in haste.

Who are these families, and what exactly do they want?
What was the ruling that sat them at the ministry door on 11 September?
Why are people who object to a court ruling at the ministry, not at the courthouse?

The third question is the most important. We have to build the first two before we get to it.

Chronology: Six Days, One Ruling, One Photograph

11 September 2026, Kahramanmaraş. The 4th High Criminal Court, at the end of a fifteen-hour sentencing hearing, finished the Ezgi Apartment case. The building had collapsed on 6 February 2023; 35 people had died. The prosecution had written the indictment as "homicide with eventual intent" and had asked for 876 years each for the two main defendants. The court changed the name of the offence to "conscious negligence" and gave those two eight years each. Then it released both of them: a travel ban, a signature twice a week. Three defendants were acquitted; among them is an architect employed by Kahramanmaraş Municipality.

11 September 2026, Ankara. The same day the Families in Pursuit of Justice Platform sat down in front of the Ministry of Justice. The spokesperson, Döne Kaya, hung their demand on a banner: "Akın Gürlek, have you seen the Ezgi Apartment ruling?"

14 September, the fourth day. Families came from Kahramanmaraş, Hatay and Adıyaman. The police put up barriers around the protest area. The question the platform's Adıyaman representative, Celal Gezer, put to the minister is the summary of that day: "Are you protecting capital? Are you protecting the political rent? Are you protecting the contractor? Why are you not defending the right of the baby who died?" Döne Kaya announced the same day that the vigil was open-ended: "If this justice we cannot reach goes on like this for another four years, another ten years, we will come to your palace as well, and we will continue our struggle there."

15 September, the fifth day. In the evening hours the police asked the families to take down some of the banners. What was on them? Photographs of the defendants in the Ezgi Apartment and Manolya Sitesi cases, taken with the President. They had been there for five days; no one had said a word. When the families refused to take them down, the banners were seized; the ground was that the President's "prestige had been damaged." Döne Kaya wrote what had happened the same night from her own account: "After I said I would not take the banners down, the security forces tore the President's photograph. I ask you: who damaged his prestige?" The post reached more than a hundred thousand people in a night. Kaya's sentence to journalists is also on the record: "The character of my family, who stayed six days under the wreckage, was not damaged. The prestige of the president who had his photograph taken with those responsible for the deaths has been damaged."

16 September, the sixth day. The İHD visit; the demands were put in writing.

Let us fit what happened in six days into one sentence: A court gave eight years for 35 deaths; the state tore the photograph in the hands of those who objected. Now look closely at this picture; we will come later to who is standing in the photograph.

Who Are These People?

The Families in Pursuit of Justice Platform is a solidarity organisation founded by families who lost their relatives in the 6 February earthquakes. On their own site they write that they are made up of the families of 37 separate buildings; from Malatya to Hatay, from Adıyaman to Kahramanmaraş. There is no association, no budget, no headquarters. There is a spokesperson, provincial representatives, lawyers and a website. The site keeps the case files building by building; it publishes reports; it shares petition texts.

Read the names; because every time I use the word "families" in the rest of this piece, these are the people I mean.

Döne Kaya, the platform's spokesperson. In Malatya she lost her mother, her sister, her brother and her nine-month-old nephew. The question she asked in front of the Court of Cassation: "Why do we constantly have to seek our rights in this country?"

Celal Gezer, the Adıyaman representative. The person who follows the Öztekin Apartment file in Gölbaşı; who took the Interior Ministry's refusal to grant investigation permission for municipal officials to the Council of State and had it quashed.

Salman Torun lost his 34-year-old lawyer son Mustafa in Akerman Apartment (18 dead). His sentence in front of the ministry: "My child was killed. That building was four or five years old."

Sibel Köksalan lost her daughter at Trend Garden Residence. I put her sentence at the head of this piece.

Nurgül Göksu lost three children and a six-month-old grandchild in Ezgi Apartment. At the sentencing hearing she asked for an aggravated sentence for the defendants; eight years came out.

Safiye Yaşar. She is not an earthquake survivor. On 5 September 2023 she lost her daughter and her son-in-law in a flood in Kırklareli, and she is beside the platform. Note this aside; we will come back to it. That an earthquake platform embraces a flood family shows that the struggle has named itself correctly: the matter is not the earthquake, it is impunity.

The platform's voice is an X account opened in July 2023: @Adaletpesindea. There is a single sentence in the biography: "In the 6 February 2023 earthquakes we died together; together we will secure justice." As of today more than seven thousand posts, around five thousand five hundred followers. Seven thousand posts means a record of every hearing, every adjournment, every release over three years; the most regularly kept archive of earthquake cases in Turkey is not in a ministry, it is in this account. Their pinned posts are a hearing calendar: month by month, which province, which building, which day; and a one-sentence call: "Be with us by attending the hearings." Their tags are their programme: #olasıkastasahipçıkıyoruz and #depremdavalarınasahipçık. Five thousand five hundred followers, in a country of 53 thousand dead, is a figure to be ashamed of; changing that is one of the tasks at the end of this piece.

The platform also keeps its own memory. On the reports page there are three documents: a report that quantifies the expectation of justice in the second year of the earthquake (August 2025), the 2023–2025 activity report (December 2025), and a report on the 11th Judicial Package. That last one matters; because it shows that this platform has won once.

December 2025: They won once

When the 11th Judicial Package came to Parliament, its 27th article was widening the early-release mechanism known in the execution law as "Covid leave" and was covering offences arising from the collapse of buildings as well. In plain Turkish: a tacit amnesty for contractors and building inspectors. The families sat for three days in Cemal Süreya Park, next to Parliament. The AKP group chair, Abdullah Güler, said "we will leave earthquake offences outside the scope"; on 24 December 2025 the package was adopted with earthquake offences added to the list of exceptions.

Keep this in mind: a three-day sit-in changed the text of a law. We will see that the families sat down at the Ministry of Justice's door knowing not the minister but their own experience.

Ezgi Apartment: From 876 to 8, from "Eventual Intent" to "Conscious Negligence"

Young comrades, read this section with care; because the whole of Turkey's earthquake cases is being decided in the distance between these two words.

In criminal law there are degrees of causing a person's death. Intent is wanting the death. Eventual intent (olası kast) is not wanting the death but saying "so be it"; it is foreseeing the result and accepting it. Conscious negligence (bilinçli taksir) is foreseeing the death and hoping "it will not happen"; it is seeing the result but not wanting it. The difference in the sentence is not years, it is decades. In eventual intent each death is a separate penalty; 876 years for 35 deaths comes from this. In conscious negligence it is counted as "one act, many results"; the upper limit for 35 deaths is roughly a handful of years.

Now look at the Ezgi Apartment file. The two main defendants, Sami Kervancıoğlu and Mustafa Pekel, are the operators of Kervan Pastanesi under the building. After the earthquake they remained fugitives for about two years; once caught they were tried in detention for 14 months. The technical supervisor Mehmet Tekin's defence is in the record: "I have 35 buildings in Kahramanmaraş. I made no mistake in those; would I make one in this building?" The legal name of this sentence is a defence; its sociological name is a confession: if a single person can carry the technical responsibility for 35 buildings in a city, there is no inspection.

The court decided that two defendants who had fled for two years had not "foreseen and accepted" the deaths, only "foreseen and hoped they would not happen." Then it released these two people on the ground that there was no risk of flight. The prosecution took the ruling to appeal; in its grounds it wrote that the technical reports showed the defendants' primary responsibility, and the two-year period as fugitives. The file is now on appeal.

Look also at those acquitted. Three people were fully cleared; one is an architect employed by the municipality. The chain of responsibility breaks at the point it touches the public official. Is this an accident? It is not; in the next section you will see that this has a law.

The ledger

Let us put the sentences given in other cases from the same earthquake side by side; because eight years on its own is a number, side by side it is a pattern.

Case	Dead	Classification of the offence	Sentence
Hasan Alpargün Apartment (Adana)	96	Eventual intent	62 aggravated life sentences for the contractor + 865 years
Ebrar Sitesi (Kahramanmaraş)	more than 1,400	Conscious negligence	17 years 6 months for the contractor
Trend Garden Residence (Malatya)	31	Conscious negligence	12 years 5 months – 17 years 5 months; a one-sixth reduction on the grounds of "clean record" and "effect on the future"
Ezgi Apartment (Kahramanmaraş)	35	Indictment: eventual intent → Ruling: conscious negligence	eight years each + release; 3 acquittals

Sources: Sözcü's judicial balance sheet and BirGün's Trend Garden report. The same country, the same earthquake, the same penal code. 62 life sentences for 96 deaths, 17 years for 1,400 deaths, eight years for 35 deaths. If you cannot see a relation between the number of dead and the sentence in this ledger, you are seeing correctly: there is none. The relation is somewhere else; to find it, one detail in Trend Garden's reasoned judgment is enough.

At Trend Garden the building had been converted from 12 flats to 42. Unlicensed. Then, with the 2018 "zoning amnesty," on the defendants' declaration, it was made lawful on paper. The court wrote in its grounds that these declarations were contrary to the facts; but that was not the subject of the case. That is, a thing the state had whitewashed by a law could not be counted as part of the crime in the same state's court. There is no relation between the sentence and the death; there is a relation between the sentence and how property was whitewashed.

What Do They Want? Eight Demands, Eight Translations

I take the list İHD published this morning as it stands. Under each item, for young comrades, I write the answer to the question "what does this demand want to change." Because the demands are written in a polite legal language; the reality underneath is not polite.

1. The trial of all those responsible: that responsibility not be confined to contractors alone. Translation: Today those sitting in the dock in earthquake cases are almost only the contractor, the architect, the engineer and the building inspector. Those who issued the licence, who did not inspect, who changed the zoning plan, who whitewashed with the "zoning amnesty," are not defendants. It is not only the one who built a building who kills; it is also the one who permitted it to be built.

2. That public officials also be investigated: that licensing, inspection, zoning and other public responsibilities be examined. Translation: Municipal zoning directors, public-works offices, building-inspection branches, the governorate and ministry staff. The municipal architect acquitted in Ezgi Apartment is the concrete counterpart of this item.

3. That investigation permissions be granted: that the administrative obstacles in front of the trial of public officials be lifted. Translation: This is the lock on the list. Under Law No. 4483 on the Trial of Civil Servants and Other Public Officials, for an investigation to be opened against a public official the administrative superior must first give permission: the governor or district governor for municipal staff, the Interior Minister for a mayor. If permission is refused the prosecutor cannot open the file. Families may object; the objection is heard by the Regional Administrative Court or the Council of State. That is, the prosecutor tries the contractor, the minister tries the civil servant. The law is from 1999; it came into force in the first year of the earthquake and has been working in every earthquake since.

Examples, from a single source, ANKA's follow-up: Gözde Apartment in İslahiye, Gaziantep, 25 dead; Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya refused permission for five officials including the former mayor; the ground was that the expert had counted the municipality as "secondarily responsible." Öztekin Apartment in Gölbaşı, Adıyaman; the minister refused permission, the ground being that the municipal archive had "gone under water during the earthquake"; the 1st Chamber of the Council of State quashed the decision for "incomplete examination". Yunus Kaya Apartment, 67 dead; Nur Sitesi, 48 dead; the same pattern. Lawyer Gülsüm Özdoğru's summary: three years and three months have passed since the earthquake; most investigations concerning public officials have not become indictments.

4. The acceleration of pending files: that investigations be completed and indictments prepared. Translation: In front of the Court of Cassation Döne Kaya named three: İskenderun State Hospital, Rana Apartment, Arı Apartment. Three years and seven months have passed; there is no indictment. Who is responsible for the collapse of a state hospital? This question has not even begun to be asked.

5. An effective and fair trial: that the evidence and the chain of responsibility be assessed as a whole. Translation: Pay attention to the word "chain." Today every case is a chain with its links broken: the contractor in one file, the civil servant (if there is one) in another, the ministry in none. If the chain is not seen as a whole, each link throws the crime onto the other and the result is conscious negligence.

6. That the causes of the earthquake deaths be brought into the open: that negligence, lack of inspection and unlawfulness be set out. Translation: This was Döne Kaya's question in front of the Court of Cassation: "AFAD had prepared, before 2021, IRAP reports that foresaw the worst-case scenario; why did we lose at least 53 thousand lives?" Provincial Disaster Risk Reduction Plans were prepared, filed, put on the shelf. The name of the one who put them on the shelf is in no indictment.

7. An end to the understanding of "impunity": that no person responsible be able to escape accountability because of their position. Translation: "Because of their position." This phrase is a class finding that has leaked into a legal sentence. What makes it possible to escape accountability is not innocence, it is position. Position is the superior's signature in 4483; it is the zoning vote in the municipal council; it is standing side by side in the photograph.

8. The protection of the right to life: that justice be treated not only as settling the account of the past but as preventing the repetition of similar deaths. Translation: This item takes the platform out of being a "victims' association" and turns it into a political subject. The demand is not confined to the account of their own dead; it is for those who live in buildings not yet collapsed, in Istanbul, in Izmir. Impunity is not a problem that belongs to the past; it is the thing that today has the next building's licence signed.

The Figures: Where Is the Account Cut?

Let us keep to our principle: "under every claim a figure, under every figure a source."

The death toll: officially 53,725; injured 107,213. According to the Ministry of Justice's figures of 1 November 2025, 2,591 criminal cases have been opened concerning collapsed buildings, 837 investigations are ongoing; 148 people are in detention, 986 under judicial control. The platform's second-year report writes, from ministry data, that of 2,031 investigation files 1,491 have become indictments.

Now read these numbers side by side: 53,725 dead, 148 in detention. One detainee for every 363 deaths. This figure, on its own, describes the defendant profile of the earthquake cases: trial at liberty is the rule, detention the exception. The release of defendants who had fled for two years in Ezgi Apartment on the ground that there was "no risk of flight" is nothing more than a day's movement inside this statistic.

One more figure, a figure that is not given: how many investigation permissions were requested concerning public officials, how many granted, how many refused? This number is in no ministry statement. Building by building, from information lawyers gave ANKA, we learn it in pieces. In the censorship piece we said: the text of the decision is not published; the count is given by an association's volunteer ledger. It is the same here: it is not the state that keeps the account, it is the families of the dead. The absence of the data is also a datum.

Class Reading: The Earthquake Is Natural, the Collapse Is Not

Let us return to Celal Gezer's three questions: "Are you protecting capital? Are you protecting the political rent? Are you protecting the contractor?" These three questions are lined up in one sentence; but they are in fact three storeys of a single structure. Let us go down storey by storey.

First storey: the contractor. In Turkey construction has been, since the 2000s, the main channel of capital accumulation. Urban rent, public tender, TOKİ, zoning change: all are cogs of the same machine. In this machine the easiest way to cut a building's cost is to cut from the steel, the concrete, the ground survey. There was a pastry shop under Ezgi Apartment, a café under Manolya Sitesi; at Manolya the expert reports write that load-bearing walls were removed and a storey added. Profit comes out of the column. This is not a "moral problem"; for every contractor producing under conditions of competition it is a balance-sheet question.

Second storey: the public official. What makes it possible for the contractor to cut from the column is the licence and the inspection. The municipality that signs the licence, that passes the inspection, that writes a name on paper as "technical supervisor," that raises the storey count in the zoning plan. The name of this storey is 4483: it is not the prosecutor who tries the civil servant, it is the superior. And the superior has a superior; at the top, the Interior Minister. The ground for refusing permission for five officials for 25 deaths at Gözde Apartment is written in the law itself.

Third storey: political rent. With the 2018 zoning amnesty millions of unlicensed buildings became "lawful" in return for a declaration and a fee. This was an election-year measure; an unsafe building stock was whitewashed in return for votes and fee revenue. Trend Garden's rise from 12 flats to 42 passed through this whitewash. The parliamentary majority that passed the zoning-amnesty law, the ministry that applied it, the Treasury that wrote the revenue into the budget: none of them is a defendant in any indictment. They cannot be; because what they did is, by law, "in accordance with the law."

Now stack the three storeys: The contractor is tried (sometimes). The civil servant is protected by permission (mostly). Those politically responsible are never tried (by law). This is the distribution of punishment not by fault but by position. The phrase "because of their position" in the platform's seventh demand is exactly the description of these three storeys.

Comrade, grasp the movement here well. By trying the one who built the building the state is not saving property, it is saving its own legitimacy. Handing the first link of the chain to the court is the cheapest way of making the remaining links invisible.

When we assessed İHD's 2025 report we wrote: workplace murders that year were 77 percent of recorded deaths, and the state was absent in the factory, present in the square. The earthquake is the mass form of the same asymmetry. On 6 February 2023, 53 thousand people did not die of a "natural disaster"; they died of an unlicensed storey, of steel cut from the column, of sand taken from the river, of a "zoning amnesty" declaration. The naturalness of the earthquake is the curtain that covers the social character of the collapse. The families say this with a banner: "Not a disaster, a massacre." And the banner is legally correct as well; this is the definition of "eventual intent": to foresee the result and say "so be it."

Official narrative / Class reading

Official narrative	Class reading
"Disaster of the century", "natural disaster"	The earthquake is natural, the collapse social; a building does not fall of itself, it falls from profit
"Conscious negligence"	The shrinking of a foreseen death by criminal law; 35 deaths = one act
"Investigation permission was not granted"	4483: the superior tries the civil servant; the chain of responsibility breaks where it touches the public
"Zoning amnesty"	The whitewashing of an unsafe building stock in return for votes and fees; the legalisation of the crime by law
"No risk of flight"	The release of a defendant who was a fugitive for two years; detention is a class exception
"The President's prestige"	The document of standing side by side with the defendant is protected more than the photograph of the dead
"The process is working"	53,725 dead, 148 in detention; a hospital whose indictment has not even been written in three and a half years

What Is Being Covered Over?

Three things.

First, the photograph. On the evening of 15 September the police took from the families' hands the photograph of the defendants with the President and, according to Döne Kaya's testimony, tore it. There were two photographs. One is the owner of Ezgi Apartment, the operator of Kervan Pastanesi. The other is a defendant in the Manolya Sitesi case: Mehmet Sait Kanbur, the owner of MADO. Manolya Sitesi is also in Kahramanmaraş, in Onikişubat; blocks A and B collapsed, and there too 35 people died. On the ground floor there was a café run by the Kanbur family; two expert reports wrote that the café had removed load-bearing walls and added a storey, and that the contractor and the operators were "primarily at fault". A third report attributed no fault to the MADO owners; then the expert panel withdrew from the file, and the case was adjourned to 9 November. Kanbur, on 30 November 2024, was in the party that saw the President off at the airport; the photograph is from there. Seeing the head of state off while sitting in the dock: this is the picture of the word "position."

One more detail, the one that binds the two files together: the municipal zoning director Fahri Yiğitoğlu and the architect Veli Çiftaslan, who are being tried "for negligence" in the Manolya Sitesi indictment, were also defendants in Ezgi Apartment. The same municipality, the same signatures, the same court, 70 dead in two buildings. At Ezgi they got 4 years 5 months; at Manolya the file is waiting for an expert. The thing we call the chain of responsibility is not an abstract concept; it is two people who carry the same name in two indictments.

Now turn back to the photograph. A pastry-shop owner, the boss of an ice-cream chain and the head of state standing in the same frame is the visual summary of how licensing, inspection and the zoning amnesty work in that city. The tearing of the photograph is more explanatory than the event itself. The state is protecting what it calls "prestige" because it knows exactly what is visible in that frame. And that is why Döne Kaya's question will go unanswered: the one who damages prestige is not the one who hung the photograph, it is the one who had it taken.

Second, the construction worker. There is one thing in none of these cases: who built those buildings, under what conditions, at how many hours a day, at what wage. The worker who tied the steel of Ezgi Apartment knows better than the boss who fled for two years what is inside the column. But that worker is not a witness; that worker is not in the file. In Turkey construction is the first branch of workplace murders; the collapsed building and the worker who died while building it are two ends of the same relation of production. The absence of the worker in the earthquake cases is not a gap, it is a design: if the worker were a witness, the chain of responsibility would be read not from the expert report but from the process of production.

Third, time. Three years and seven months have passed since the earthquake. Every year that passes brings this for the files: detention periods run out, "reasonable time" objections arrive, witnesses scatter, defendants age ("release on health grounds" is a formula for this reason), and the statute of limitations approaches. For causing death by conscious negligence the limitation period is 15 years; it looks distant, but for files whose indictment has not even been written the clock is running. When the families say "accelerate the pending files" they are not being polite; they are racing against time. The lengthening of time is not a neutral delay, it is a mechanism that works in capital's favour.

Why at the Ministry, Not at the Courthouse?

Now we have come to the third question.

If you do not like a court ruling you go to appeal; the families went. Then you go to the Court of Cassation; on 1 September the families were in front of the Court of Cassation, as the judicial year opened. Then you sit down at the Ministry of Justice; and the minister will say, "the judiciary is independent, I cannot interfere with a ruling." So why?

Because the families know that the problem is not a court ruling. The problem is the ground on which the ruling is given: the signature of 4483 is at the Interior Ministry, the delay of the indictment is at the prosecutor's office, the zoning amnesty is in Parliament, the judicial package is prepared at the Ministry of Justice. The Court of Cassation can quash a file; but it cannot grant investigation permission. The families' walk from the Court of Cassation to the Ministry is the same instinct as the Akbelen villagers' walk from the Council of State to MAPEG's door: they know where the decision is made.

And remember December 2025. They sat for three days in Cemal Süreya Park; the law changed. Not at the courthouse door, at Parliament's door. This is the lesson the platform has learned from its own history: the legal path is necessary, but what determines the result is how long the force in front of the door stays there. Döne Kaya's sentence "we will come to your palace as well" is not a threat, it is a map; a map of the places where the decision is made.

Law is the minutes of the balance of forces. The families have sat down not to change the minutes, but to change the balance.

And what did the Ministry do? It put up barriers, had a photograph torn. In six days not a single official came out and spoke with the families. That too is an answer. That a state does not see the relatives of the dead sitting at its door tells you whose door that state sees.

What Is This to You?

You may say, "My house did not collapse, my relative did not die." You may not; I will write why.

First, the same building. No one knows exactly how much of Turkey's building stock is unsafe; but we know that millions of buildings that passed through the zoning amnesty are still standing. Before the earthquake expected in Istanbul, no one can say which building is "Ezgi Apartment." Impunity is not the past's problem, it is the next licence's signature. That is why the eighth demand is all of ours: "to prevent the repetition of similar deaths."

Second, the same law. "Conscious negligence" is not only the classification of earthquake cases; it is the standard classification of workplace murders as well. The boss of the worker who dies in the mine, on the building site, in the shipyard is also tried, mostly, for conscious negligence, mostly at liberty, mostly with a reduction. If "eventual intent" is won in the earthquake cases, that case-law is a weapon in workplace murders as well. The families' struggle is building the legal ground of your not dying at your workplace.

Third, the same rule. The principle we built in the censorship piece and in the Family Dossier holds here as well: the rule protects everyone; a rule breached in one place is breached everywhere. There is no difference between 4483 protecting the public official in earthquake cases, protecting the police in an allegation of torture in detention, and protecting the spending in a trustee municipality. The same article, the same signature, the same "permission has not been granted."

Fourth, Safiye Yaşar. That a woman who lost her daughter in a flood in Kırklareli sits beside the earthquake families shows that this struggle has named itself correctly. Flood, earthquake, mine, train crash, workplace murder: in all of them the same chain, the same 4483, the same conscious negligence, the same "the process is working." Impunity is not a type of disaster, it is a class regime. That is why there is no "earthquake" in the platform's name; there is "justice."

Concrete Tasks

A diagnosis is not a programme. Let us be concrete.

Learn the eight demands by heart. Read the list İHD published, together with the translations under it; to someone around you who says "the contractors are being tried, look" tell the third item, 4483. A statute number does more work than an hour of argument.
Carry the figure. 53,725 dead, 148 in detention. 35 dead, eight years. Say these two pairs with their source; when you hear the sentence "justice is taking its course," these four numbers are enough.
If you are in Ankara, go. The front of the Ministry of Justice is walking distance from Kızılay. Sit for an hour. Talk with a family, learn their name, ask which building they are from. Solidarity is not a post, it is a chair.
Find the building in your own province. In your province, in your district, what is the state of the case of which building that collapsed on 6 February? Look at the case files on the platform's site; if they are not there, pull them from the local press. Has investigation permission been requested, has it been granted? Write this information on a page, share it.
If you are a computing worker, take on the technical load. The ministry does not publish the number of investigation permissions concerning public officials. Scan the news building by building and build an open data set: building, province, number of dead, official for whom permission was requested, decision, result of the objection. Scattered data is in the state's favour; gathered data is ours.
If you are a lawyer, write the case-law. The Hasan Alpargün ruling is the first example in Turkey of eventual intent being accepted in an earthquake case. For the Ezgi Apartment appeal file this ruling is a precedent. There is a need for someone who will put the two reasoned judgments side by side and write why in one eventual intent came out, in the other conscious negligence.
Put the worker into the file. If you are in your union, in your chamber, if you have contact with construction workers: put on the agenda an oral-history study that will collect the testimony of the workers who built the collapsed buildings. A witness who is not in the file is a truth that is not in the court.
Tell December 2025. A three-day sit-in changed an article of a law. Give this example to everyone who says "nothing changes"; the date, the place, the result.
Do not forget the photograph. The photograph the police tore is this struggle's most explanatory document. Tell what was torn, why it was torn; because what a state hides shows what it protects.
Follow, multiply. The platform's account @Adaletpesindea, the spokesperson's account @dk_donekaya. Five thousand five hundred followers is the measure of how many people in this country are looking at earthquake cases; raise that by one person today. Share the hearing calendar from your own account; go to the hearing in your province. It is not a ministry that keeps a seven-thousand-post archive, it is the families of the dead; the multiplying of that archive is in your hands.
Organise. The Families in Pursuit of Justice Platform is an organisation the families of 37 buildings built with their own hands. Neither a party founded it, nor a union. But look at who is beside them: İHD, the bars, the professional chambers, members of parliament. For a demand to find an addressee there must be organised force behind it. Every day you do not organise in your neighbourhood, at your workplace, at your school, the licence of the next wreckage is being signed.

Dear Young Comrades,

Let us return to Sibel Köksalan's sentence: "I do not want to seek my right; give me my right so I no longer have to look for it."

This sentence is not an expression of tiredness; it is a theory of the state. It says that a right is something that is to be given, but that in this country the right is given only to the one who seeks it, and only as far as they seek. And that the one who seeks is always the same side: the side of those who remained under the wreckage. The contractor does not seek a right; their right has been given in advance, by licence, by permission, by photograph.

The families are today, for the sixth day, at the door of the Ministry of Justice. The ministry put up barriers, had a photograph torn, did not speak. The appeal court will see the file; perhaps it will quash it, perhaps it will not. But the families are not there to wait for the ruling; they are there to show the place where the ruling is given. A year ago they sat for three days at Parliament's door and changed a law; they sat down this time without a time limit because they know this.

Impunity is not a judicial error, it is a class order: the prosecutor tries the contractor, the minister tries the civil servant, no one tries the minister. The only thing that breaks this order is how many days are spent in front of the door.

We will write again when the ruling is announced, when the vigil ends, or when the minister speaks.

Comradely.

Knowledge belongs to everyone.