A group of Turkish lawyers have taken allegations concerning the treatment of street dogs following Türkiye’s 2024 legal changes to an international animal rights tribunal in Geneva.
On 2 October, Avukatın Sesi İnisiyatifi, Voice of the Lawyer Initiative held a press statement outside Istanbul’s Çağlayan Courthouse before submitting an application carrying 75 signatures to the International Court of Justice for Animal Rights in Geneva.
The application follows more than two years of intense controversy surrounding Türkiye’s street dog population and the implementation of the amendments to Animal Protection Law No. 5199 introduced in 2024.
The lawyers say their submission includes allegations of dogs being killed, tortured and subjected to cruel treatment following the legal changes. It also raises concerns about conditions inside animal shelters, including overcrowding, hunger, restricted public access and failures to properly investigate alleged offences.
Lawyer Nur Meşe, speaking on behalf of the initiative, said lawyers and animal advocates had repeatedly attempted to pursue cases through Türkiye’s domestic system.
According to Meşe, complaints concerning alleged abuses have been made to municipalities, governors and other public authorities, with lawyers providing what they say is supporting evidence. The initiative argues that these efforts have repeatedly failed to result in effective investigations or permission to prosecute those allegedly responsible.
The submission also raises concerns about barriers to adoption and actions affecting animal welfare organisations and individual advocates.
For those working in animal welfare in Türkiye, another fundamental issue sits behind many of these concerns: accountability for dogs once they have been removed from the streets.
Across Türkiye, enormous numbers of dogs are now being collected by municipalities. New shelters and so called natural living areas are being constructed and existing facilities expanded.
Yet a basic question remains extraordinarily difficult to answer in many places.
Where are the dogs?
How many have been collected? How many remain alive? How many have been sterilised, treated, adopted, transferred or died? Where individual dogs have been moved between facilities, can their journey through the system be traced?
These are not unreasonable questions. They are fundamental requirements of any large-scale system responsible for the lives of animals.
Restricted access to shelters makes those questions even more important. When animals disappear from public spaces into facilities the public cannot freely observe, transparent records become essential.
The Geneva application is an attempt to take these concerns beyond Türkiye.
The initiative says domestic avenues have been exhausted and that its objective now is to place the allegations before an international audience and seek condemnation of what it says has occurred since the 2024 changes.
There is, however, an important distinction. Despite its name, the International Court of Justice for Animal Rights is not an international court with binding judicial powers comparable to the European Court of Human Rights, the International Court of Justice or a United Nations tribunal.
The body was established in the late 1970s by Swiss animal protection campaigner Franz Weber. HAYTAP, Türkiye’s Animal Rights Federation, describes it as a private initiative and a moral and symbolic court. Its decisions are not recognised by states as legally binding.
Its purpose is instead to use public proceedings to examine serious allegations involving animals, attract international attention and hold those accused of wrongdoing morally accountable.
Türkiye has been brought before the body previously. In 2013, HAYTAP submitted a case concerning dolphin parks and sought international condemnation of Türkiye over their continued operation.
That means the current application cannot overturn Türkiye’s 2024 legislation. It cannot order municipalities to release dogs, prosecute officials or compel the Turkish government to change its policies.
But that does not make the submission meaningless. Its purpose is visibility.
It creates another documented record of the allegations being made inside Türkiye and takes those allegations to an audience beyond the country’s borders.
That is particularly significant when the central complaint from lawyers and animal advocates is that evidence and complaints submitted through domestic channels have not produced accountability.
The application comes as animal advocates across Türkiye continue to protest the treatment of street dogs and demand a different approach.
The question now is whether the Geneva tribunal accepts the application, whether proceedings follow and what evidence is ultimately placed before it.
Whatever happens next, one question will continue to follow Türkiye’s rapidly expanding collection and shelter system:
Where are the dogs, and what happened to them after they were taken?
For every dog entering that system, there should be an answer.