The names of more than 1,000 appointed judges and prosecutors have been announced following the 26th Judicial Court Ceremony in the presidential palace at Beştepe, Turkey, held with the participation of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Among those appointed was Suleyman Doğruöz, the former president of the Grey Wolves organisation for the Faculty of Law at Ankara University. Doğruöz is notorious for his role in the organisation’s 1-2 June 2017 attack on revolutionary students at the university.
The Grey Wolves are a Turkish far-right political movement and the youth wing of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). During the attack involving knives, cleavers, machetes and sticks in 2017 against leftist students at the university, Doğruöz was photographed holding a knife. Now, seven years later, Doğruöz is the new Adana Ceyhan Public Prosecutor. He is now a member of the MHP, which has been part of an electoral coalition with the Justice and Development Party (AKP) since 2018, and has been formally aligned with Erdoğan and the AKP since 2015. The AKP/MHP coalition appointed more than 13,000 new judges and prosecutors between 2017-2022.
The Grey Wolves’ Turkish supremacist ideology promotes Turkish ethnicity, culture and national identity. They see other identities such as Kurdish, Greek, Armenian and Jewish people as “external enemies”. They have been linked to violent attacks and killings both in Turkey and Europe.