Our report Keep the Volume Up: Intimidation Policies Against Rights Defenders 2015-2021 aims to expand the monitoring efforts we carry out by providing an analysis of administrative and legal intimidation policies that rights defenders under risk have faced during 2015-2021, whose profiles are featured in the Sessiz Kalma (Keep the Volume Up) web site. This report is the joint product of the Keep The Volume Up project team working under Supporting the Human Rights Organization and its Defenders program and our Legal Studies team. 

The 2015-2021 period, during which fundamental rights and freedoms were interfered with in an arbitrary manner, was marked by a hostile attitude targeting different subjects who spoke out against government policies, such as politicians, journalists, academics, trade unionists, professional groups, non-governmental organizations, activists, and rights defenders. These unlawful and anti-democratic interventions, whose main purpose is to silence dissident voices, range from enacting new laws that will impede the activities of civil society to abusing the current legislation maliciously, from abusing administrative and judicial powers to controlling the media and organizing smear campaigns by making unfounded news with a wide repertoire.

Based on this current and urgent need, this report has been prepared in order to draw a panorama of the interventions aimed at hindering the work of rights defenders in Turkey.