Who Is Osman Kavala and Why Is He Still Inside?
The Osman Kavala File: 3,234 Days, Two ECtHR Judgments, One Constitutional Article — and Where the Template That Criminalises Gezi Reaches Today
Comrade, Who Is Osman Kavala and Why Is He Still Inside?
On 25 August 2026 the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights ruled for a second time in the Osman Kavala case. It found Turkey in violation of six separate articles — including the prohibition of torture — and said he “must be released as soon as possible.” The decision was taken 15 to 2. As of 26 August 2026, Kavala has been in detention for 3,234 days.
Comrade, this piece is written for you.
You have probably heard the name but do not quite know who he is. On one side he is called “the man of foreign powers, red Soros”; on the other, a “hero of democracy.” Both hand you a ready-made feeling and stop you thinking.
Our job is not to distribute feelings. Come, let us open this file together — and end up in a place that is much harder, and much more instructive.
First, two easy traps
When a young person coming from within the left sees this news, there are two traps they can fall into.
First trap: “The man is a bourgeois — what is it to us.”
It sounds class-conscious. It is not. Because if we defend a person’s rights according to whether we like their class position, then we are not defending rights at all — we are distributing sympathy. And know this well: in a regime where criminal law has been turned into a political weapon, being that weapon’s first target does not make you its last. A method run today against someone you “do not feel close to in conscience” stands ready tomorrow for the worker on strike.
Second trap: “He is a hero of democracy; to criticise him serves the government.”
This is the trap of liberal sanctification. Defending a person because they have suffered injustice is not the same as adopting their political project. If we are forced to treat the politics of everyone who suffers injustice as correct as well, we are left with no analysis — only pity and admiration.
The third place, and the hard one, where we stand is this:
Defend unconditionally in legal terms. Criticise openly in class terms. Do both at once, without muddying either.
To be able to do that, comrade, is political maturity itself. Now let us begin.
Who is this man?
Osman Kavala was born in Paris on 2 October 1957. The family was a tobacco merchant family that came to Turkey from northern Greece with the 1923 population exchange.
Education: Robert College, METU Business Administration, economics at the University of Manchester. He began a doctorate at the New School for Social Research in New York. In 1982, after his father’s death, he left it unfinished, returned to Istanbul and took charge of the Kavala Group of Companies.
That is: a commercial capital inherited, not founded. He did not build it; he took it over. Keep that in mind; it will be needed shortly.
What follows is not a “businessman” biography but a biography of institution-building:
| Year | What he founded / joined |
|---|---|
| 1983 | İletişim Publishing (immediately after 12 September; among the founding partners) |
| 1984 | BİLSAK — culture, arts and discussion centre |
| 1985 | Ana Publishing (Turkish edition of Britannica) |
| 1990s | TEMA, Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly, History Foundation, TESEV |
| 2002 | Anadolu Kültür — founder |
| 2008 | DEPO — independent art space in Tophane |
| — | Founding member and board member of Open Society Foundation Turkey |
What did Anadolu Kültür do? It opened art centres in Diyarbakır and Kars; it advocated moving cultural production beyond Istanbul, Turkey–Armenia dialogue, and recognition of cultural rights in the Kurdish question. His wife, Ayşe Buğra, is a professor of political economy at Boğaziçi University.
Comrade, notice: this is not a criminal file; it is a portrait of a hegemony project. And that is precisely what concerns us.
First lesson: What is his class position?
Let us ask the question correctly. Not “good man or bad man.” This:
Which class, which fraction, which historical project does this person represent?
The answer has three layers.
1. As property: the bourgeoisie. No debate needed. Owner and manager of a family corporate group that owns means of production. His income comes not from his labour but from his property. In Marxist analysis, class is determined not by a person’s intentions but by their place in the relations of production. By that measure Kavala is a bourgeois.
2. As fraction: capital’s culturally liberal wing, articulated to the West. The Turkish bourgeoisie is not a single piece. Roughly: export-oriented, West-facing big capital; capital tied to the domestic market and public tender, organically bound to power; and new capital groups of provincial origin that grew quickly. Kavala stands inside the first, even at its most “cultural” edge: the wing that defends EU membership, the rule of law and cultural pluralism as a programme of stability and predictability.
3. As function: a capitalist who assumed the role of organic intellectual. Recall Gramsci’s language: every class produces intellectuals who will get its worldview accepted by society at large as “everyone’s common sense.” Kavala did not stop at being a businessman who made money; he founded a publishing house, a foundation, an art centre, dialogue programmes. That is, he built the cultural infrastructure of his own class fraction.
There is a subtlety here; do not skip it. Marx and Engels write in the Manifesto that a section of the bourgeoisie — especially its intellectual section — can, at certain historical moments, pass over to the ranks of the proletariat. Engels himself was a manufacturer. So class origin does not mechanically determine political camp.
But the reverse is also true, and that is the real issue: individual good faith does not change a project’s class character. Kavala’s personal honesty, courage and contributions to culture are debatable and largely defensible. None of that removes the fact that the programme he defends is a bourgeois-democratic reform programme.
That programme is this: fix the law, recognise cultural rights, draw closer to Europe, strengthen institutions — and do not touch the property relation.
Comrade, our objection is not that this programme is ill-intentioned. That it is insufficient. And today he himself is paying the price of that insufficiency: the man who set out claiming to build the rule of law lies in a cell where the law has been entirely suspended.
Second lesson: His relation to the EU and international funding
Now we come to the heading most often distorted. This is where we must be careful.
The power bloc says: “Kavala is Soros’s man; he organised Gezi with foreign funds; this is an attempt at occupation.”
You need to understand how this narrative works, because it will confront you again and again.
First put the fact down. Kavala is a founding member of Open Society Foundation Turkey; he says so himself. Anadolu Kültür works with culture programmes supported by European institutions and European partners. Turkey–Armenia dialogue projects and cross-border cultural collaborations ran within this frame. None of this is secret; these are contractual, announced, audited relations. The Open Society Foundation, right after this criminalisation campaign, closed its activities in Turkey in November 2018.
So there is no hidden secret. The reason a conspiracy theory is needed is precisely this: to present as crime something that is not secret, you have to invent secrecy.
Now to the real question. As Marxists our question is not “did he take funding.” Our question is this:
What did these funds finance, and what did they not finance? And what did that preference shape?
Here is the real criticism, and it is far heavier than the power’s “foreign agent” literature:
1. The language of “civil society” replaced the language of class. In Gramsci, civil society is the terrain where the struggle for hegemony is fought — not a neutral place but a battlefield. The liberal funding regime took this concept and emptied it: civil society became “the well-intentioned third sector between state and market.” Thus the labour–capital contradiction turned into “dialogue among stakeholders.”
2. The project cycle replaced struggle. The natural result of the funding regime is this: the donor’s priority sets your agenda, the budget calendar sets your duration, “output indicators” set your success. A strike can last three years; a project does not. An organisation endures; a project ends when it ends.
3. The professional replaced the militant. When rights struggle becomes a profession, the subject of struggle shifts from the victim to the expert. The Kurdish question can be taken up under the heading “cultural dialogue,” while the same question’s dimensions of land, property, migration and cheap labour remain outside the frame.
4. And most importantly: democracy was tied to an “external anchor.” This wing’s strategy rested on the assumption that democratisation in Turkey would come through the EU process, harmonisation packages and external oversight. Comrade, that strategy was put to the test and the result is plain: when the anchor was hauled up, everything tied to it was dragged with it. Today there is an ECtHR judgment; there is no one to implement it.
Read the concluding sentence carefully: What is really to be criticised in Kavala is not “taking funds from outside” but staking democracy on a programme that does not rest on class organisation inside. The power’s accusation is false; our criticism is real. And the two must never be confused.
Third lesson: Why is he kept inside?
The official answer: TPC 309 (attempt to abolish the constitutional order), TPC 312 (attempt to abolish the government), TPC 328 (political espionage).
For the real answer look at the ECtHR’s finding. As early as 2019 the Court wrote that the measures taken pursued an “ulterior purpose” — to silence an NGO activist and human-rights defender. That is a violation of Article 18 of the Convention: using the restriction of rights for a purpose other than the one declared. In the judgment of 25 August 2026 the Grand Chamber repeated this once more and more heavily; it found that the authorities acted “in bad faith” in maintaining the detention and that the Gezi protests were peaceful.
So why him? Why so insistently, for nine years?
Because the issue is not Kavala. The issue is what name will be given to Gezi.
Recall what Gezi was in 2013: an unorganised, leaderless, spontaneous mass movement encompassing millions. That such a thing is unacceptable to power is not political but ideological. Because to accept a spontaneous mass movement is to accept that the mass is a subject capable of moving on its own.
In its place a command centre was invented. A financier, a plan, a foreign connection. Thus the movement of millions was reduced to the plot of a few people.
Comrade, do not miss the real target of this operation: the aim is not to imprison Kavala but to strip the mass of subjectivity.
And once this doctrine is established, it does not stay there. Look at what has happened in this country in recent years: miners asking for their wages were detained in Ankara; strikes were postponed on grounds of “national security”; for every social protest a “foreign connection” was sought. The legal template built in the Gezi trial is a mould standing ready for every subsequent resistance.
That is why, comrade, that file is your file.
Fourth lesson: A chronology of legal destitution
Now I will give you a table. Read it quickly. This table is the step-by-step record of how law was turned into a political instrument.
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| 18 October 2017 | Detained at the airport in Istanbul |
| 1 November 2017 | Arrested (TPC 309 and 312) |
| 2017–2019 | No indictment for 16 months. Detention without knowing what he was charged with |
| 4 March 2019 | Gezi indictment accepted; aggravated life sentence sought for 16 people |
| 10 December 2019 | ECtHR: violations of Articles 5 and 18. Immediate release. Not implemented |
| 18 February 2020 | ACQUITTED in the Gezi case |
| The same day / hours later | Before the ink of the acquittal was dry, re-arrested under TPC 309 |
| 9 March 2020 | As the ECtHR judgment was about to become final, arrest on espionage (TPC 328) |
| 20 March 2020 | Acquitted under 309 — but remained inside |
| 2021 | Cases joined, severed, rejoined |
| 3 December 2021 | Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe launched infringement proceedings — first in Turkey’s history, second in the Council of Europe’s |
| 25 April 2022 | Aggravated life sentence (TPC 312). Acquitted of espionage. Eighteen years each for the other defendants |
| 11 July 2022 | ECtHR: Turkey failed to fulfil its Convention obligation |
| 28 September 2023 | Conviction upheld by the higher court |
| 25 March 2026 | ECtHR Grand Chamber hearing |
| 25 August 2026 | Grand Chamber, second judgment: violations of six articles (3, 5, 6, 10, 11, 18). 15 to 2. €70,000 non-pecuniary damages, €43,342 costs, within three months. “Must be released as soon as possible.” |
Now see three things separately from this table, comrade.
First: the man who was acquitted did not get out. Read that sentence slowly. A court said “you are not guilty”; the door did not open; the same day another file was opened. In law this is called a “revolving door.” Where acquittal produces no consequence, trial is nothing but a form.
Second: the function of the espionage charge. The person was acquitted of espionage — but that charge was used as the means of maintaining detention at the moment the ECtHR judgment was about to become final. That is, the charge was produced not for conviction but for detention itself. In criminal law, detention is a measure, not a punishment; here it has been reversed.
Third — and this is the most important piece of legal knowledge you need to know:
Article 90 of the Constitution: where properly ratified international treaties concerning fundamental rights and freedoms conflict with statutes, the provisions of the treaty prevail.
So complying with an ECtHR judgment is not “Europe’s imposition.” It is the command of Turkey’s own Constitution. Not implementing the judgment is a stance not against the outside but against one’s own constitutional order.
Let us also record the reply given. The day after the judgment, on 26 August 2026, Presidential Chief Adviser Mehmet Uçum wrote: “In ECtHR judgments there is at no stage absolute binding force as to substance”; the authority to comply or not with violation judgments lies with national courts; and Turkey is being “forced to review” its being party to the Convention and the right of individual application.
Comrade, keep these sentences well. Because here you are hearing the right of individual application being opened to debate. Whose interest do you think that right serves? The detainee who is tortured. The trade unionist dismissed from work. The association that is shut down. The family of the woman who is killed. A safeguard “reviewed” for a bourgeois philanthropist, when lost, leaves the poor most naked.
Fifth lesson: In the same file there is also a workers’ lawyer
Now I will show you the most class-marked place in this file, because most reporting skips it.
One of those who received eighteen years in the same case in which Kavala was convicted is Can Atalay. A lawyer. Legal counsel to Taksim Solidarity. And more importantly: the lawyer of Soma and Ermenek. That is, a person who represented the families of workers who died in the mine.
In 2023 he was elected member of parliament from Hatay. He was not released from prison, not sworn in; his seat was stripped. The Constitutional Court repeatedly found rights violations; the judgments were not implemented. As of May 2026 he continues to be held in Marmara Prison.
Comrade, look at the picture:
In the same file, a cultural capitalist and a workers’ lawyer lie side by side.
This is not coincidence; it is a method. By inventing a “Gezi collective crime,” the regime lined up people from very different class positions inside a single plot. And see this: when the law is suspended, the capitalist is not protected either. Because this order’s working does not protect an entire class but a bloc articulated to power. Unarticulated capital and organised labour can both end up at the same door.
This is not a flaw in bourgeois law — it is proof of what its limit is. Law is not an arbiter standing outside the class struggle; it is a position built inside that struggle and defended by that struggle. If it is not defended, it is lost. And the first hand from which it slips is the weakest one’s.
Sixth lesson: What, then, is our criticism as a class vision?
Now let us speak honestly, comrade. We criticise Kavala and his circle’s political project under five headings.
1. They constructed the subject wrongly. In this project the force that changes history is not organised labour; it is an enlightened minority, well-designed institutions and the right legal frame. The people in this design are usually “beneficiaries,” not subjects.
2. They defined the contradiction wrongly. Their main contradiction is “authoritarianism–democracy.” Ours is the labour–capital contradiction, and we explain authoritarianism on that ground too: where capital accumulation cannot produce consent under crisis conditions, it resorts to force. If you define the contradiction only at the level of political regime, even if the regime changes, exploitation remains the same.
3. They built networks instead of organisation. Foundation, platform, initiative, project. These are flexible, fast, pleasant — and they scatter under pressure. Organisation is heavy, slow, boring — and it stands under pressure. The last ten years have been the laboratory of that difference.
4. They tied themselves to an external anchor. We set this out above: the expectation of democratisation from outside deferred the work of accumulating class power inside. When the anchor broke, there was nothing left to hold on to.
5. They did not touch property. This is the most basic. Cultural pluralism, the rule of law, freedom of expression — all are things to be defended, and we defend them too. But when ownership of the means of production is left outside the debate, every right obtained remains a permission valid only up to capital’s threshold of tolerance. Permission is withdrawn as it was granted. What is happening today is exactly that.
Now let us also say the other side honestly — because one-sided analysis is not analysis:
These institutions have done concrete work that cannot be belittled. An art centre in Diyarbakır, a culture programme in Kars, human contacts built between Turkey and Armenia, memory work, archives, translations. Much of this was done in fields the left left empty. Comrade, take this not as an accusation but as a task: where you have not filled a field, you have no right to be angry that someone else fills it.
And ask yourself this question: Do our organisations have the power to do this work without funding, with their own resources, with their own labourers? If the answer is “no,” then even if the criticism is correct it is insufficient. Completing criticism is building the alternative.
Watch out: three narrative traps
This file will come to you in the coming days in three forms. Recognise all three.
1. The “foreign powers” narrative. It seeks a foreign hand behind every social protest. Its function is this: to erase the class contradiction inside the country. If a miner asking for wages becomes a “foreign agent,” then unpaid wages are not a problem. This narrative was built for Kavala, then adapted to everyone.
2. The “hero philanthropist” narrative. It presents Kavala as a saint and Gezi as his work. Unwittingly it confirms the power’s thesis: both reduce the spontaneous movement of millions to the feat of a few people. Gezi was no one’s work; it was its own.
3. The “technical legal matter” narrative. “Domestic remedies not exhausted,” “case law disputed,” “procedure complex.” This language turns nine years of detention into a procedural problem. Yet the issue is not procedure: a person is being held inside despite having been acquitted and despite two international court judgments.
Against all three the tool in your hand is the same: In whose hands? Under whose control? For whose benefit?
So what do we demand?
Comrade, let us be honest: none of the following changes the system. All of them defend today’s position. To be revolutionary is not to belittle today’s position — because when the position is lost, the first to be crushed is the least organised.
1. Implement the ECtHR judgment; release Kavala immediately. This is not a request for favour; it is what Article 90 of the Constitution requires.
2. Drop the Gezi case in its entirety. Can Atalay, Mücella Yapıcı, Çiğdem Mater, Tayfun Kahraman and the others. The judgment was given not for one person but for a fabricated collective crime; the challenge must be to the whole file.
3. Implement Constitutional Court judgments immediately. Where a lower court does not recognise a Constitutional Court judgment, the constitutional order effectively does not exist. This holds for Can Atalay and for every detainee whose rights are violated.
4. Do not apply TPC 309 and 312 to the right of protest. If peaceful demonstration can be counted as “attempt to abolish the government,” then there is no such thing as a right to demonstrate. These articles are applied today to Gezi, tomorrow to a strike.
5. Do not open the right of individual application to debate. Withdrawal from the Convention is presented as a matter of “sovereignty.” It is not. What will be lost is not the state but the citizen — and most of all the citizen with no lawyer to defend them, no money to pay, no embassy behind them.
And one directly for us, comrade:
The real conclusion to draw from this file is not “a good philanthropist suffered injustice.” It is this: a democracy built with someone else’s funds, someone else’s institutions, someone else’s law does not stand when that someone else withdraws. What falls to us, then, is to defend rights while at the same time building organisations that stand on our own feet — with dues, with solidarity, with labour. It is boring. It is slow. And it is the only lasting thing.
Last word
Young comrade, if only one thing from this piece is to stay in your mind, let it be this:
We criticise Osman Kavala in class terms and defend him unconditionally in legal terms. This is not a contradiction; it is political maturity itself.
We criticise: because a democracy programme that does not touch property and leans not on organised labour but on an external anchor collapsed at the first hard wind — and the proof is the cell of its own author.
We defend: because in an order where a person who has been acquitted can be held inside for nine years, no one has a guarantee. The method that works on him today stands ready tomorrow for the worker on strike.
This is the exact place to recall Rosa Luxemburg’s sentence:
“Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.”
Luxemburg did not write this to defend liberalism. On the contrary, she was saying that revolutionary power can see its own mistakes only where opposition can breathe. The measure is this: you are defending a right if you can defend it for the person you like least.
And one last thing. This man has been inside for nine years. From prison he continued to write, to give his defence, to follow the work of cultural institutions. He said that the criminalisation of Gezi had created “an example of accusation that can be used for other protests.”
He was right. And that example has reached today as far as the miner in Ankara asking for his wages.
That is why his file is your file.
In comradeship
