Why Saying “If We Have No Future, You Will Have No Peace” Is Not a Crime Why Detaining Them Is Unlawful

Dear Young Comrades,

This piece is a call before it is a long analysis. For the call to stand, we need to know, one point at a time, what happened, what the law says, and where the decision parts company with the law. A short summary first, then the detail.

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The Case in Five Points

1. What happened? Before a visit by Yusuf Tekin, the Minister of National Education, to Kadıköy Anatolian High School in Istanbul, a banner was hung around the school: "If we have no future, you will have no peace. Yusuf Tekin, resign."
2. Who? Nehir Dizdar (Galatasaray University) and Nevin Tekin (Istanbul University), members of the Student Bureau of the Workers' Party of Turkey (TİP). Both are 19 or 20.
3. How? Both were taken from their homes at midnight. According to TİP, the prosecutor sent them to the judgeship with a request for detention without taking their statements. On 25 October 2026 the Istanbul Anatolian 8th Criminal Judgeship of Peace detained them both.
4. The charge? "Threat committed jointly by more than one person" (Turkish Penal Code, Article 106/2-c). The judgeship treated the words "you will have no peace" as a threat and an act of intimidation. It added, as grounds, a risk of flight, a risk of tampering with evidence, the insufficiency of judicial control, and the fact that they had "shown no remorse".
5. Where is the unlawfulness? Political criticism was counted as a threat. The detention threshold was crossed only by the aggravated form. Two students were put in prison on formulaic grounds, and an expectation of remorse was turned into a reason for detention. In short, detention was used as a punishment.

Our demand is simple: Nehir and Nevin must be released at once. A banner is not a crime.

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What Happened? A Short Chronology

When	What happened
Before the minister's visit	A banner is hung around Kadıköy Anatolian High School: "If we have no future, you will have no peace. Yusuf Tekin, resign."
At night, about 1.30 a.m.	Police come to Nehir's home on Heybeliada with two vehicles and take her into custody. Nevin is taken from her home as well.
After the arrest	According to TİP, the prosecutor refers them for detention without taking a statement.
25 October 2026	The Anatolian 8th Criminal Judgeship of Peace detains them in separate decisions. Both are sent to the prison in Bakırköy.
26 October 2026	In every classroom at Galatasaray University a chair is left empty for Nehir: "This chair is empty because our classmate has been detained!" The same banner is hung at Boğaziçi, Galatasaray, METU, Istanbul Technical University, Hacettepe and Ege.
26 October 2026	The Private Sector Teachers' Union calls the detention "an attack on democratic rights". The member of parliament Sezgin Tanrıkulu shares the decision and calls it "a burden on the conscience".

Nehir's mother, Zübeyde Dizdar, spoke to Cumhuriyet: "My daughter committed no crime. Protesting a minister is a legal right. I am proud of my daughter." She described her daughter as "responsible, conscious, conscientious and brave".

The Charge: What Article 106 Says

The decision rests on Article 106 of the Turkish Penal Code, the offence of threat. Its structure matters, because part of the unlawfulness is hidden exactly here:

• 106/1, first sentence: Threatening a person with an attack on their life, body or sexual integrity. The penalty is imprisonment from 6 months to 2 years.
• 106/1, second sentence: Threatening to cause major damage to property, or threatening "some other harm". This form depends on a complaint. The penalty is up to 6 months' imprisonment or a judicial fine.
• 106/2: If the threat is made with a weapon, while concealing one's identity, by an unsigned letter, or jointly by more than one person, the penalty rises to imprisonment from 2 to 5 years.

Now look at Article 100/4 of the Criminal Procedure Code: where the upper limit of imprisonment is not more than two years, a detention order cannot be made. The only group outside that ban is intentional offences against bodily integrity. Threat is not in that group.

Put the two together. Even on the widest reading, "you will have no peace" contains no attack on life or body. At most it can fall under "some other harm". That form depends on a complaint, carries at most six months, and does not permit detention at all. Detention becomes possible only when the aggravated form, "two people hung it together", is added. What puts two students in prison is not the weight of the words. It is how many of them there were. A banner is hung by two people. It is that simple.

(Note: I am not a lawyer. This reading rests on the text of the statutes and on the publicly available summary of the decision. For the details of the file, the statements of Nehir and Nevin's lawyers are what count.)

What Kind of Unlawfulness? Point by Point

Political criticism was treated as a threat

The formula "If we have no future, you will have no peace" follows the construction of a protest slogan known around the world: No justice, no peace. The formula does not promise violence. It states a condition: until the demand is met, the opposition will continue and those in power will not rest easy. What follows the slogan says what is being asked: resignation. The demand is that a minister step down, a political result inside the constitutional order.

Article 26 of the Constitution protects freedom of expression. Article 34 protects the right of assembly and demonstration. Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights binds Türkiye. The settled case law of the European Court of Human Rights is plain:

• Handyside v. the United Kingdom (1976): Freedom of expression protects not only ideas that are favourably received, but also those that "offend, shock or disturb".
• Lingens v. Austria (1986): Politicians must tolerate far wider criticism than private individuals.
• Eon v. France (2013): Even a small fine imposed on an activist who held up an insulting banner during a visit by President Sarkozy was a violation of freedom of expression. The reason was the chilling effect of punishing political satire and protest.

What is at stake in this case is not even a fine. It is detention. Sezgin Tanrıkulu's question is exactly right: "Should it not be politicians who have to tolerate the harshest criticism?"

The detention threshold was crossed only through the aggravated form

As set out above, the words themselves do not allow detention. The aggravated form "by more than one person" is a provision the legislator put in place to punish an organised, frightening threat (a gang, the pressure of a group). Applying it to two students hanging a banner together reverses the purpose of the article. Collective political action then becomes an aggravating factor of its own accord. On that logic, every banner carried by two people is an "aggravated threat".

The grounds for detention are formulaic; there is no concrete fact

Article 101/2 of the Criminal Procedure Code requires the strong suspicion of a crime, the grounds for detention and proportionality to be shown by concrete facts. Take the grounds in the decision one by one:

The decision's ground	The concrete situation
Risk of flight	Two students, 19 or 20, with known addresses, living with their families and attending university. They were taken from their homes. There is not a single sign that they fled.
Risk of tampering with evidence	The evidence is a banner and, probably, camera footage. The banner was already hung in public, and the same one is now hung on dozens of campuses. There is nothing to tamper with.
"The evidence has not been fully collected"	Collecting evidence is the prosecutor's job. The price cannot be paid with the suspect's liberty.
Judicial control would not suffice	Article 109 offers many options, including an obligation to sign in and a ban on leaving the country. It has not been shown why these would fail.

Article 19 of the Constitution treats personal liberty as the rule and detention as the exception. In this decision the exception has become the rule.

"Showing no remorse" is not a ground for detention

The decision also notes that the students showed no remorse. Article 100 of the Criminal Procedure Code contains no such ground. Remorse can be discussed only if there is a conviction, when the sentence is determined (Turkish Penal Code, Article 62). Expecting remorse before a trial has even begun breaks two principles at once: the presumption of innocence in Article 38 of the Constitution, and the principle that no one may be compelled to make a statement against themselves. A person detained because they are "not remorseful" about a political view has been detained not for the act, but for the thought.

Referral without a statement, a midnight raid

According to TİP, the prosecutor referred them straight for detention without taking their statements. That is procedurally possible, but for two students whose identities are known it shows haste. The raid at 1.30 a.m., with two vehicles, says the same thing. A method used for serious crime was used on two young people who could have been invited to give a statement. The method itself is a message.

Detention was used as punishment

In many judgments concerning Türkiye (for example Şık v. Turkey, Kavala v. Turkey, Demirtaş v. Turkey (No. 2), Grand Chamber) the European Court of Human Rights has held that using detention to silence critical voices violates Articles 5 and 10 of the Convention, and sometimes Article 18. The common finding is this: when the real aim is not to secure the proceedings but to silence the person and those who follow them, detention is a punishment imposed before judgment.

The real addressees of this decision are not Nehir and Nevin. They are their classmates. The message is: "If you tell the minister to resign, you go to prison." In law this is called a chilling effect. The empty chairs at Galatasaray are the first answer to that message.

Why Does a Banner Frighten Them This Much?

The legal argument matters, but the question also has a class face. The banner does not say "future" for nothing. The reasons Nehir's mother listed are what young people and teachers have been saying for months:

• MESEM and child labour: Under the Vocational Education Centres programme, children aged 14 and 15 spend most of the week at workplaces, for a pocket wage far below the minimum wage. The school supplies capital with a pool of cheap, poorly insured labour. Reports by the Workers' Health and Safety Assembly record that children in this programme have been killed in workplace murders.
• Violence in schools and a collapsing public education: Teacher shortages, crowded classrooms, paid teaching and the spread of fee-paying education. We set out the figures in The Bell Does Not Ring the Same for Everyone.
• Student poverty and a future that has been closed: University is no longer a channel of advancement. It is a channel of debt and uncertainty. We discussed the class content of that change in Whom Is the University For?.

Whose "peace"? The family of the child who loses a finger to a machine in a MESEM placement has no peace. Nor does the paid teacher, nor the student who cannot pay the rent. The banner carried that unrest to a minister's door, and that is all. What disturbs them is not a threat. It is exposure.

What the capitalist state really fears is not angry young people one by one, but organised young people. That Nehir and Nevin are members of a party's student organisation is not written in the reasoning. It is what explains the weight of the decision. Yesterday we wrote how students in Serbia used plenums to beat a government at the ballot (They Walked Past the Algorithm). Those in power know the strength of organised youth.

What Can We Do? Concrete Tasks

Speaking out is not a feeling. It is a list of work:

1. Write a solidarity letter. Send a postcard and a letter to Nehir Dizdar and Nevin Tekin at the prison in Bakırköy. What matters most to a prisoner is knowing that the outside has not forgotten. Do not go into the details of the case. Solidarity is enough.
2. Be visible on campus. Repeat the empty-chair action in your own school, in your own classroom, at the start of class. Photograph it. Share it.
3. Move your union, your chamber, your association. Eğitim Sen, the Private Sector Teachers' Union and the bar associations have taken a stand, or they can. Ask the organisation you belong to for a written statement. This is not a student matter. It is every worker's freedom of expression.
4. Follow the appeal. The lawyers will challenge the detention, and an individual application to the Constitutional Court is also open. Share the dates of hearings and appeals. Fill the courthouse.
5. Call the minister and the opposition to account. If Minister Tekin or his office filed a complaint, demand that it be withdrawn. If not, demand that he say plainly that the detention is wrong. Ask members of parliament for a parliamentary question.
6. Reach journalists and press workers. This story must not fall off the agenda. If we stay silent, nobody speaks.
7. Keep MESEM on the agenda. If the subject of the banner is forgotten, the detention has achieved its aim. Keep circulating the record of child labour, workplace murders and violence in schools.

The Call

Dear Young Comrades,

Nehir and Nevin told a minister to resign. In a democracy the cost of that should have been a frown at most. Today the cost is the days two young people spend in prison.

This decision does not target two people alone. It targets a generation's voice. The answer cannot be given one by one. It has to be given together. An empty chair on every campus, the same banner in every classroom, a statement in every union, a word of solidarity in every letter.

A banner is not a crime. Criticism is not a threat. Organising is not a crime.

Freedom for Nehir Dizdar and Nevin Tekin!

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