Leaked Draft Law Exposes Turkey’s War on Queerness & Plan to Imprison LGBTQ+ Citizens

There is a particular cruelty to oppression that hides behind the language of virtue. It does not announce itself with fire and smoke, but with laws dressed in the disguise of “protection.”

In Turkey or Türkiye (as the government officially renamed itself in 2022), that disguise has become a weapon. The government’s proposed 11th Judicial Package, leaked last month and condemned by Human Rights Watch (HRW), isn’t just a legal reform; it is a declaration of war on the country’s queer and trans citizens. It is, in HRW’s words, “one of the most alarming rollbacks of rights in decades.”

If passed, the law would criminalize what it calls “attitudes or behaviors contrary to biological sex and general morality.” Translation: the very existence of LGBTQ+ people. It would impose prison sentences of up to three years for being openly queer, four years for taking part in a same-sex ceremony, and up to seven years for healthcare professionals who provide gender-affirming care. It would also raise the minimum age for gender-affirming medical treatment from 18 to 25, require government-approved evaluations, and mandate permanent infertility as a condition for care.

This is not governance, it’s gender policing. It’s a state trying to erase those it chooses not to understand.

The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has long relied on “protecting the family” and “public morals” as rhetorical shields for repression. But this time, the stakes are existential. Article 225 of the Turkish penal code, currently addressing “indecent acts” would be amended to explicitly target anyone who “engages in attitudes or behaviors contrary to biological sex.”

That language is purposefully vague, engineered to criminalize everything from pride parades to trans existence to a same-sex couple holding hands. Under this law, queerness becomes “indecent.” Love becomes contraband.

The government’s justification, “to defend the family” rings hollow when one remembers that queer and trans people are part of families, that they build families. But this isn’t about family. It’s about power. It’s about moralizing oppression and calling it order.

The AKP has spent years scapegoating LGBTQ+ Turks as the source of societal decay, painting them as agents of Western moral corruption. This narrative serves a political purpose, when an economy falters, when freedoms vanish, the state needs a distraction. It needs an “enemy within.” And who better than the already marginalized?

If this draft becomes law, it would not only criminalize queer identity, it would criminalize solidarity. Civil society groups advocating for LGBTQ+ rights could face prosecution for “promoting” immoral behavior. Journalists covering these issues could be silenced. Doctors providing care could lose their licenses and their freedom.

This is how fascism functions in the modern world, not only by silencing the oppressed, but by punishing those who dare to care for them.

The Turkish Medical Association has already condemned the proposal, calling it a violation of human rights and medical ethics. Fifteen LGBTQ+ groups have also sounded the alarm, warning that the amendments would push queer people into hiding and healthcare into dangerous underground networks.

When you criminalize compassion, you cultivate despair. When you criminalize identity, you breed violence.

And make no mistake, this law, if passed, will kill. Whether by imprisonment, by suicide, or by silence, it will claim lives.

Turkey is a party to several international treaties, including the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). Both prohibit discrimination and guarantee the right to privacy, freedom of expression, and bodily autonomy.

The European Court of Human Rights has already ruled in Bayev and Others v. Russia that laws “embodying a predisposed bias against a homosexual minority” are incompatible with the ECHR. Turkey knows this. Its leaders have read these judgments, signed these treaties, and still, they choose tyranny.

As HRW’s Europe and Central Asia Director Hugh Williamson put it plainly, “Bringing criminal charges against people for their gender identity or sexual orientation is a profound violation of human dignity and amounts to state-sanctioned oppression.”

The European Union, the Council of Europe, and every member state that claims to champion democracy should be outraged. Yet, outrage is easy. Pressure is harder. If Turkey’s allies remain silent, or worse, diplomatic then they become accomplices.

This proposed law exposes the rot at the core of nationalist moralism. What is “public morality” if not a shield for violence? What is “protecting the family” if it demands the sacrifice of someone else’s child?

To call queerness a crime is to call freedom itself obscene. And if Turkey’s leaders think they can legislate queerness out of existence, they misunderstand the nature of queerness entirely. It does not die in darkness, it organizes there.

Throughout history, queer people have survived empires, inquisitions, and epidemics. They have written poetry in exile, built communities in shadows, and found ways to love when love was forbidden. No law, no prison, no decree can unmake that lineage.

But the cost of that survival should not be romanticized. It is not noble to suffer for one’s humanity, it is unjust to be forced to.

What’s happening in Turkey is not an isolated moral panic; it’s part of a global authoritarian pattern. Across the world, from the United States to Uganda, governments are resurrecting anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric as a tool of control. They are rewriting “morality” to mean obedience.

The Turkish government’s proposal is a warning shot to all of us. It reminds us that rights are not static, they must be defended daily. And silence, even under the guise of diplomacy, will always side with the oppressor.

Williamson called this a “defining test” for Turkey’s commitment to democracy. He’s right, but it’s also a defining test for ours. For every government that claims to defend human rights. For every organization that waves a rainbow flag in June but whispers in October. For every citizen who believes queerness is someone else’s fight.

We cannot afford the luxury of disbelief. These laws are not theoretical. They are the architecture of persecution being built in real time.

If Turkey criminalizes queerness today, it gives permission to every regime watching closely to do the same tomorrow.

This is not morality, this is not family, this is not law, rather this is state violence.

And as queer people, as allies, as human beings, we must meet it not with fear, but with fire.

Because to be queer is to remember that every breath we take is already resistance.