Authoritarian Legality as Legal Unknowability (Meçhullük): Criminalising the Visual Documentation of State Violence in Turkey's Anti-Terror Prosecutions

This article examines the prosecution of photojournalist Abdurrahman Gök, who photographed the police killing of Kemal Kurkut in Diyarbakır on 21 March 2017. Gök was later arrested and charged under Turkey’s Anti-Terror Law (TMK) with ‘making propaganda for a terrorist organisation’. Drawing on fiili meçhul (‘unknown acts’), a phrase coined by Gök’s defence attorney during the trial, I develop meçhullük (‘unknowability’) as an analytic framework for understanding how anti-terror prosecutions criminalise the documentation of state violence while redeeming that violence–legitimating and obscuring it–through securitisation discourse. This process is rooted in the Turkish state’s long-standing criminalisation of Kurdish ethnic and political expression. Through interviews with Gök and his defence attorney, Resul Temur, courtroom observation, and visual-semiotic and discourse analysis, I show how meçhullük transfers guilt from perpetrators to witnesses, while also tracing how this legal unknowability is contested through the photographic evidence of Kurkut’s killing.