Istanbul Pride Marched Anyway — and Police Detained More Than 50, Including Journalists and Lawyers

Every summer, the same ritual plays out in Istanbul. Organizers call a Pride march. The governor’s office bans it. Police flood Taksim Square, raise metal barriers, and close down metro stations. And every summer, people show up anyway — in small clusters, on side streets, unfurling flags for as long as it takes officers to reach them.

This year the ritual turned, once again, into mass detention. On Sunday, June 29, Turkish police detained at least 50 people during Pride events in Istanbul, according to organizers and press unions. Among those taken into custody were six lawyers and at least three journalists — including Müberra Ünsal, a reporter who repeatedly identified herself and held a valid press card, and who was detained regardless.

It was the eleventh consecutive year that authorities banned Pride in Turkey’s largest city.

What happened on the ground

Police concentrated their presence around Taksim Square and İstiklal Avenue, the historic heart of the city and the traditional gathering point for Pride. Iron barriers went up. Officials banned demonstrations across several key districts, including Kadıköy on the Asian side of the Bosphorus, and restricted subway service to central stations to make it harder for people to converge.

Marchers adapted the way they have learned to over the past decade — moving in smaller groups, gathering quickly, reading statements before police could disperse them. The 12th Istanbul Trans Pride March, held in the days surrounding the main event, met the same response: organizers reported that officers arrived and detained several participants, journalists among them.

The Turkish Journalists’ Union condemned the detention of accredited press. Documenting a banned assembly is not the same as participating in it, the union noted — a distinction that has repeatedly collapsed under Turkey’s approach to Pride.

Why Pride is banned in the first place

Istanbul Pride was not always an act of defiance. In the early 2010s it drew tens of thousands of people down İstiklal Avenue in what were, by all accounts, large and peaceful celebrations — among the biggest Pride events anywhere in the Muslim-majority world.

That ended in 2015. Citing public order and security concerns, authorities banned the march, and they have renewed some version of that ban every year since. Rights groups have consistently rejected the security rationale, pointing out that it was the bans themselves — and the heavy police deployments that enforce them — that introduced confrontation into what had been a festive event. The European Court of Human Rights has previously found that blanket bans on Pride assemblies in Turkey violated the right to freedom of assembly, but the annual prohibitions have continued regardless.

Turkey’s trajectory on LGBTQ+ rights has been sliding for years. The country sits near the bottom of ILGA-Europe’s Rainbow Map ranking, and official rhetoric has grown sharper, with senior figures framing LGBTQ+ identity as a threat to the family and the nation. Against that backdrop, the simple act of gathering with a rainbow flag has become one of the few remaining forms of public visibility — which is exactly why people keep doing it, and why the state keeps trying to stop them.

The regional picture

We cover a lot of Pride in this part of the world, and the contrast is worth sitting with. In the Western Balkans, cities that once saw Pride marches attacked or banned outright — Belgrade, Skopje, Sarajevo, Tirana — now hold them under police protection rather than police assault, however imperfectly. The direction of travel there, tied in no small part to EU accession pressure, has been slow but broadly upward.

Turkey, an EU candidate on paper since 1999, has moved the other way. The detentions in Istanbul are a reminder that the freedom to assemble is not a one-way ratchet, and that visibility won in one decade can be criminalized in the next.

What stays constant is the turnout. Bans, barriers, and detentions have not produced the disappearance authorities seem to want. Year eleven looked a great deal like year one: people arrived, flags came out, and the message — that they exist and will not be hidden — got made, at real personal cost.

Those detained were expected to be processed and released, as in previous years, though legal observers were monitoring the cases of the journalists and lawyers among them closely. We’ll follow what happens next.

Sources: South China Morning Post, PinkNews, Attitude, France 24.