Turkey’s New Sentencing Law Lets Courts Jail 12-Year-Olds for Life

A 14-year-old boy just became the first test of a law that lets Turkish courts send children away for decades — and the court did not hold back.The boy, identified only by the initials E.Ç., was sentenced on September 8 to nearly 19 years in prison for fatally stabbing a 17-year-old and threatening four other teenagers with a knife.The Bakırköy 2nd Juvenile High Criminal Court handed down a sentence of 14 years and nine months for the killing alone, adding further time for the threats and a weapons charge — a term that would have been unthinkable for a child that age under the law Turkey scrapped just weeks earlier.The case is the first real test of Law No. 7593, which went into force on August 18 and rewrote the rules governing how Turkish courts punish children. Judges can now impose sentences of up to 27 years on children as young as 12, and life imprisonment on those 15 and older.Previously, life sentences were automatically reduced to no more than 24 years for children aged 15 to 18 and to no more than 15 years for children 14 and younger. Other sentences were automatically reduced by one-third for the older children and by half for younger ones.The shift did not come out of nowhere.“There have been some important efforts at reforming Turkey’s criminal law about minors, but overall it reflects many of the problems of the criminal justice system overall: increasing levels of incarceration and extensive use of pre-trial detention,” an associate professor of Middle East history and history department chair at St. Lawrence University, Howard Eissenstat, tells The New York Sun.“At some basic level, the Turkish system seems to be taking on many of the worst characteristics of the American penal system.”The question now hanging over Turkey’s courts is a simple one: if a 14-year-old can be sent away for nearly two decades under this law, what is left of the idea that a child is not an adult?A Law Born Of OutrageOn January 24, 2025, a 14-year-old Turkish-Italian boy, Mattia Ahmet Minguzzi, was stabbed and kicked as he lay bleeding in a crowded market at Istanbul’s Kadıköy district. Footage of the attack spread quickly online, and with it, a national reckoning over youth violence that Ankara is still working through.The two teenagers responsible, ages 15 and 16, each received 24 years — at the time, the maximum sentence Turkish law allowed for minors. For Minguzzi’s family and a large share of the Turkish public, that ceiling felt like an insult to the victim. By mid-July, the ruling Justice and Development Party had submitted a bill stripping away the automatic sentence reductions that had long shielded minors from adult-length punishment.Under the old rules, that reduction was not optional.“Previously, there was a mandatory sentence reduction when children aged 15 to 18 committed crimes,” a professor of criminal and medical law at Istanbul, Hakan Hakeri, tells the Sun.Now, judges weighing intent, motive, method, and prior convictions can withhold the sentence reduction entirely for 15- to 17-year-olds convicted of intentional killing or aggravated injury resulting in death. Mr. Hakeri says the driving force behind the change was less the Minguzzi case than a broader spike in youth crime and a pattern of exploitation.“There has recently been a significant increase in crimes — particularly homicide — committed by children in this age group. That is the primary reason. The second reason is that criminal organizations exploit these children to commit crimes because they receive lighter sentences,” he says. “The Minguzzi incident isn’t the primary reason. Still, it might have had an indirect effect.”Politicians seeking to build support for the harsher terms also invoked a second case. That was the January 14 killing of 17-year-old Atlas Çağlayan, fatally stabbed at Istanbul’s Güngören district by a 14-year-old, along with claims that criminal gangs were recruiting children. It is that same case, now closed, that produced this month’s nearly 19-year sentence for the boy known as E.Ç.The new law also orders children serving more than three years for an intentional crime, or five for a negligent one, into closed juvenile prisons rather than the education-focused institutions that once housed them.International BacklashMuch of the international community responded swiftly to condemn the move.The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, said he was alarmed that child offenders could now face life behind bars. He called on Ankara to bring the law into line with its international obligations on children’s rights, noting that under global standards, locking up a child is supposed to be a last resort used for the shortest period necessary.Turkish law was punitive even before this year’s amendments, one researcher notes.“The laws were already extremely harsh before these latest amendments. The minimum age of criminal responsibility should be 14 according to international standards, but 12-year-olds could be sentenced to prison terms as long as 15 years, and 15-year-olds could be sentenced to up to 24 years, even before the recent amendments,” the associate director of the Children’s Rights Division at Human Rights Watch, Bill Van Esveld, tells the Sun.Mr. Van Esveld says children were previously held in closed facilities only while on trial, then sent to “juvenile education centers” to serve their sentences.“Now, the default is to send all children to the detention facilities even when they’re serving their sentences,” he says, arguing that claims that the longer terms would act as a deterrent “simply ignored decades of science about kids’ brain development.”The science on what actually works runs counter to the new approach, according to a colleague at Mr. Van Esveld’s organization.“International law says juvenile justice systems are supposed to aim at rehabilitating and reintegrating kids — and there’s evidence both that when such systems are introduced, it helps public safety, and also that throwing kids in prison exposes kids to trauma, abuse and may increase the risk of re-offending,” an assistant researcher in the Europe and Central Asia division of Human Rights Watch, Deniz Bayram, tells the Sun.Mr. Eissenstat puts the consequences in blunter terms.“Children in adult prisons are obviously a recipe for disaster — the risk of abuse is very high, as is the likelihood of the child effectively being trained into a life of crime,” he underscores. “What we are seeing in Turkey is, sadly, part of a larger trend away from rehabilitation and towards ‘human warehousing.’”Not every critic sits outside Turkey’s borders.A Turkish lawyer and child rights advocate, Seda Akço, told the outlet Bianet that the emphasis on longer sentences sidesteps the failures actually driving youth crime, including gaps in the rehabilitation system and the social conditions that leave children vulnerable to recruitment by criminal networks in the first place.A Constitutional Fight AheadThe law’s opponents aren’t done fighting it. A challenge before Turkey’s Constitutional Court is expected, and legal observers say the case will test whether the new sentencing ranges hold up under both the Turkish constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights, a treaty Turkey is still bound to as a signatory.Ms. Bayram is circumspect about the odds.“We unfortunately also are not in a good position to comment, beyond just noting that challenges are being prepared,” she tells the Sun.Mr. Eissenstat is skeptical that any court fight will change the trajectory.“Turkey is, for all intents and purposes, a single-party authoritarian state,” he says. “While courts will still sometimes intervene against the government’s wishes, these cases are increasingly rare.”Mr. Hakeri, for his part, does not expect Ankara to blink.“I do not think this new provision will be repealed or amended in the near future,” he says.

Turkey’s New Sentencing Law Lets Courts Jail 12-Year-Olds for Life

Turkey’s New Sentencing Law Lets Courts Jail 12-Year-Olds for Life

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