What Changed, and What Didn't
Turkey's Grand National Assembly passed the 12th Judicial Reform Package on July 16, 2026. It became Law No. 7589, published in the Official Gazette on July 31, 2026 (Issue 33326), and took effect the same day. Most of the law is procedural housekeeping — three-month caps between civil court hearings, wider use of remote video hearings, streamlined administrative-court jurisdiction disputes.
What's notable is what got cut before the final vote. Justice Minister Akın Gürlek had spent since February 2026 building a case for a mandatory identity-verification regime: any social media platform with more than one million daily Turkish users — X, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook — would have had to authenticate every account holder through the government's e-Devlet portal, using a national ID number and a BTK-issued verification key. A provision raising the minimum age for gender-reassignment surgery from 18 to 25 and several juvenile-justice provisions were also dropped. An AKP lawmaker told reporters the excluded items would instead surface as separate standalone bills — not abandoned, just rerouted.
The Case Gürlek Was Making
It's worth taking the justification seriously before dismissing it. Gürlek argued, in televised remarks, that anonymous accounts let people harass, defame, and pressure judges mid-trial with impunity — "if a person opens an account, they must assume responsibility for it." Turkey's courts do face coordinated social-media pile-ons during high-profile cases, and bot-driven disinformation and betting-fraud networks are a real enforcement headache for regulators everywhere. A verification layer that lets authorities unmask a harasser after the fact, without exposing that person's identity to the platform or the public, is not identical to the crude "real name policies" South Korea's constitutional court struck down in 2012 — the design keeps the ID data at BTK rather than handing it to Meta or X directly. That's a real, if partial, privacy safeguard, and it deserves acknowledgment rather than a strawman.
Why the Design Still Fails the Proportionality Test
The problem is what the same verification key makes possible once it exists. Turkey is not a neutral venue for this experiment. Freedom House's Freedom on the Net 2024 report scores Turkey 31 out of 100 — "Not Free" — citing lengthy prison sentences for ordinary posts and, per Freedom of Expression Association data cited in the same report, more than 953,000 domains and 260,000 URLs blocked as of December 2023 under Law No. 5651, the 2007 blocking statute that has been broadened repeatedly since. A prosecutor's office that already uses blocking orders this liberally does not need a stronger case to also compel platforms to identify a pseudonymous journalist or opposition account holder — the chilling effect arrives the moment the infrastructure exists, whether or not any individual case is abused. Reporters Without Borders and Turkish press-freedom monitors have made exactly this argument since the draft first circulated: anonymity is not just a shield for harassers, it's the last layer of protection for whistleblowers, LGBTQ+ users, and government critics in a jurisdiction where speech prosecutions are common.
The penalty structure sharpens the concern. The original draft threatened noncompliant platforms with fines up to 3% of global turnover — enough to make X or Meta's Turkish compliance teams treat every BTK request as an order rather than a negotiation, with a nine-month phased rollout (three months for platforms to build the integration) that would have made opting out commercially unworkable. That is real leverage over how a platform designs its verification flow, and Turkey's regulatory apparatus for exercising this kind of leverage is not improvised: BTK already administers Turkey's internet-blocking regime, and RTÜK has enforced content and representative obligations on platforms since the 2020 Social Media Law. Layering identity verification on top of an existing blocking-and-representative regime doesn't add a narrow anti-fraud tool — it completes a stack that can trace a post back to a real person and then remove, throttle, or fine the platform that hosted it, all under the same authority.
What to Watch
The removal from Law No. 7589 is a genuine, if likely tactical, retreat — parliamentary pushback and the compressed timeline apparently mattered. But the AKP's own messaging makes clear this is a pause, not a reversal: the standalone bill is coming, and it can arrive with less scrutiny than an omnibus judicial package that also touches inheritance auctions and notary procedure. The version worth watching for is whether a future draft narrows the scope — verification triggered by a specific court order rather than blanket registration, judicial rather than executive-branch custody of the BTK key, and a penalty regime that doesn't give prosecutors leverage over platform product design. Absent those changes, a policy framed as anti-harassment enforcement remains, in practice, a real-name registry waiting for the next contested election or protest cycle to be used as one.