Turkey’s justice ministry said prosecution files handled at the investigation stage in 2025 contained 16,773,992 suspect entries, including 10,047,209 carried over from the previous year and 6,726,783 tied to files opened during the year, according to the ministry’s annual statistics released on March 30.
The total was equal to about 19.5 percent of Turkey’s population of 86,092,168 at the end of 2025. But the figure does not mean that nearly one in five people in Turkey was a unique suspect last year.
The ministry’s notes say the same suspect can be counted more than once if that person appears in different crime categories or is subject to more than one type of decision. The totals also include legal entities, not only natural persons.
That means the 16.8 million figure is an administrative count of suspect entries in investigation files processed in 2025, not a headcount of distinct individuals and not a count of suspects newly added during the year.
The true number of unique suspects may still have been very large, potentially in the millions, but the published statistics do not allow that to be verified.
The data were released amid long-running criticism of Turkey’s criminal justice system from European institutions and rights groups. In its 2025 report on Turkey, the European Commission said the judiciary remained under executive influence, had acted selectively against opposition figures and elected officials and had failed to implement key judgments from the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and rulings from Turkey’s Constitutional Court.
Turkey also continues to have one of Europe’s highest incarceration rates. The Civil Society in the Penal System (CİSST) reported that Turkey’s prisons held 407,266 inmates in February 2026, exceeding more than a third of the official capacity of 304,956.