Turkey Is First in Europe for Modern Slavery

There is a number that the European Union would prefer you not to think about too carefully.

Article 1 of 6 on Slavery: Turkey Is First in Europe for Modern Slavery. The EU Calls It a Candidate Country.

Turkey Is First in Europe for Modern Slavery. The EU Calls It a Candidate Country.

Slavery and the Silence Around It: Part One of Seven

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“Be angry, and do not sin.” (Ephesians 4:26). The anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God (James 1:20). So what do we do with it?

We do what James said next. We are quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry. We go to the primary sources. We count carefully. We report what we find.

Here is what we found.

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In 2023, the Walk Free Foundation published its Global Slavery Index, the most comprehensive attempt to measure the prevalence of modern slavery across every country on earth. The methodology is rigorous, the data is compiled from hundreds of sources, and the results are expressed as a rate per thousand of population so that large and small countries can be compared fairly.

Turkey ranked fifth in the world.

Not fifth in its region. Not fifth in the developing world. Fifth on earth, behind only North Korea, Eritrea, Mauritania, and Saudi Arabia. On any given day in 2021, an estimated 1.3 million people were living in conditions of modern slavery inside Turkey’s borders. Turkey has the highest prevalence of modern slavery in the entire Europe and Central Asia region, and it sits among the countries taking the least action to address it.

The European Union has been negotiating Turkey’s accession candidacy since 1999.

Those two facts belong in the same sentence. They have not been in the same sentence in any official EU communication. That silence is not an oversight. It is a policy choice, and the policy choice tells you something important about how Western institutions actually process information about Islamic governance when the information is inconvenient.

Before we examine why that silence exists and what it costs, we need to understand what we are actually measuring, where it comes from, and why Turkey’s position on that index is not a statistical anomaly but an institutional inheritance centuries in the making.

The Ottoman Inheritance

To understand what is happening in Turkey today, you have to understand what Turkey has always been.

At the height of the Ottoman Empire in the late sixteenth century, an estimated twenty percent of Istanbul’s population of five hundred thousand were slaves. The types of slavery were varied and comprehensive: military slaves in the Janissary corps, harem slaves in the Sultan’s household, domestic slaves in elite homes, agricultural slaves in the fields, and concubines whose entire lives were organized around the sexual and reproductive requirements of their owners.

The sources of those slaves were equally comprehensive. War captives from campaigns in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Christian boys levied from Balkan villages under the Devshirme system, converted to Islam, and trained as soldiers or administrators. African slaves brought across the Sahara through trans-continental trade networks. Caucasian women, specifically sought for the Imperial harem system based on their perceived physical beauty.

The Devshirme system deserves particular attention because it illustrates the specific character of Ottoman slavery most clearly. Under this system, Ottoman officials conducted periodic levies of Christian boys from subject populations in the Balkans and Anatolia. Boys between the ages of eight and eighteen were selected, forcibly separated from their families, converted to Islam, and trained either for the Janissary military corps or for administrative positions in the imperial bureaucracy. The most capable were educated in the palace school and could rise to positions of extraordinary power. Grand viziers, military commanders, and senior administrators were regularly drawn from this enslaved class.

This is the detail that Western histories of the Ottoman Empire most consistently soften. The boys could rise to positions of power, therefore the system was not so bad. The logic is identical to saying that because some enslaved people in the American South learned trades and achieved relative comfort, the institution of chattel slavery was not so bad. The forced separation from family, the compulsory conversion, the removal of identity and choice at the most formative years of a human life, these do not become acceptable because the institution that imposed them also offered, to the exceptional few, a path to advancement within its own hierarchy.

The Islamic jurisprudential framework that underwrote these practices was not incidental to them. The Quran permits the taking of slaves from among captives of war and from populations that have not submitted to Islamic authority. The Hadith literature is extensive on the permissibility and regulation of slavery, on the rights of owners over enslaved persons, and on the spiritual merit of manumission as a voluntary act of piety. Islamic law did not prohibit slavery. It organized it, regulated it, and in significant ways legitimized it as a permanent feature of the social order rather than a temporary expedient to be phased out.

This is not a hostile reading of the tradition. It is what the classical jurists wrote down. The Maliki, Hanafi, Shafi’i, and Hanbali schools all treat slavery as a legally permissible institution. The debates among them concern the conditions under which it is permissible, the rights and obligations it creates, and the circumstances under which manumission is required or recommended. None of them argue for its abolition as a matter of Islamic principle, because the sources on which they draw do not argue for its abolition. The Prophet owned slaves. His companions owned slaves. The first four caliphs owned slaves. The tradition that treats Muhammad’s example as the model of perfect human behavior cannot, without significant internal contradiction, declare that example wrong on this point.

The Ottoman Empire did not practice slavery despite being an Islamic empire. It practiced slavery in the specific forms and with the specific legal justifications that Islamic jurisprudence provided. The Quran and the Hadith supplied the framework. The empire supplied the scale.

The abolition timeline tells the story of how deeply embedded the institution was. The slave trade from Africa was not abolished until 1847, and even then enforcement was inconsistent and largely cosmetic. A royal decree emancipating all slaves, white and black, was not issued until 1882. Turkey did not ratify the 1926 Slavery Convention until 1955. By comparison, Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807 and ownership of persons in 1833. The United States abolished slavery in 1865. The Ottoman Empire, the seat of the Islamic caliphate, was still issuing emancipation decrees in 1882 and ratifying international anti-slavery conventions seventy years after the American Civil War.

This is not ancient history. It is the institutional inheritance of the state that is currently ranked fifth in the world for modern slavery prevalence and first in Europe.

What 1.3 Million Looks Like

The Walk Free Index is careful about its definitions. Modern slavery, in their framework, covers forced labour, debt bondage, forced marriage, human trafficking, and other situations of exploitation that a person cannot refuse or leave because of threats, violence, coercion, deception, or abuse of power. It does not count poverty. It does not count poor working conditions. It counts the specific condition of a person whose freedom of movement and self-determination has been removed by force or coercion.

One point three million people in that condition, in a country of eighty-four million, translates to approximately one in every sixty-five people. That is not a marginal phenomenon. That is a systemic feature of the social and economic landscape.

The Index also notes a specific pattern in the countries with the highest prevalence. They tend to be conflict-affected, they tend to have state-imposed forced labour, and they tend to have weak governance. Turkey fits two of those three criteria directly. The third, conflict, it exports to its neighbors rather than experiencing internally, as the Kurdish population of northern Syria discovered when Turkish-backed forces arrived in Afrin in 2018 and the demographic engineering began.

So who are the 1.3 million? They are not an abstraction. They are specific categories of specific people whose lives have been organized around other people’s economic interests and whose ability to refuse or leave has been removed.

They are Syrian refugees, approximately 3.6 million of whom are currently in Turkey, significant numbers of whom have been pushed by desperation and legal vulnerability into exploitative labour arrangements from which they cannot practically exit. Turkish law permits Syrian refugees to work legally only in the province where they are registered, a restriction that creates structural coercion: move for better work and lose your legal status, stay and accept whatever terms your employer offers. The International Labour Organization has documented widespread wage theft, excessive hours, child labour, and physical coercion in agricultural and textile sectors employing Syrian refugees. The legal framework that was supposed to protect them has become the mechanism of their exploitation.

They are women trafficked from Central Asia, Eastern Europe, and Sub-Saharan Africa into Turkey’s substantial commercial sex industry. Turkey functions as both a destination and a transit country for human trafficking. Women are brought in under false promises of domestic work or hospitality employment, have their documents confiscated, and are held through debt bondage and threat of violence. The US State Department Trafficking in Persons Report has consistently rated Turkey as a Tier 2 Watch List country, meaning it fails to meet minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking and is not making sufficient efforts to do so.

They are agricultural workers, primarily seasonal migrants from Turkey’s Kurdish southeast and from neighboring countries, working in conditions of debt bondage in the hazelnut, cotton, and tobacco harvests of western Turkey. The business model is well documented: labour contractors advance money to workers at the beginning of the season, the debt grows through inflated charges for accommodation and food, and workers find themselves unable to leave until the debt is repaid, which by the arithmetic of the arrangement it frequently never is.

They are children. Child labour in Turkey’s agricultural sector is extensive and well documented. Human Rights Watch has reported on the use of Syrian and Kurdish child labour in the hazelnut harvest specifically. Children as young as six work in fields during the school year, a fact that the major chocolate companies sourcing Turkish hazelnuts have been aware of for years and have not resolved despite repeated public commitments to do so. The hazelnut is the most heavily used nut in the global confectionery industry. It is in the chocolate bar in your kitchen.

The Turkmenistan connection extends the picture further. Anti-Slavery International’s research documents a direct pipeline of forced labour cotton flowing from Turkmenistan through Turkey into global fashion supply chains. Every year during the cotton harvest, the Turkmen government compels doctors, teachers, dentists, students, and government workers into the fields under threat of job loss or punishment. That cotton moves to Turkey, which has invested heavily in Turkmenistan’s textile industry through holding companies like Calik Holding, and then enters global supply chains through Turkish manufacturing. The shirt tagged Made in Turkey that you purchased last year may carry forced labour from two countries simultaneously.

The EU knows about this. Anti-Slavery International has published on it. The May Commission report documents it. The supply chain accountability frameworks exist. The political will to apply them to a NATO member and EU candidate state does not.

The EU’s Accession Arithmetic

It is worth spending a moment on what EU candidacy actually requires, because the gap between the stated requirements and Turkey’s actual position is not a matter of degree. It is categorical.

EU accession requires candidate countries to demonstrate compliance with what are called the Copenhagen Criteria, established in 1993. These require stable institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and respect for and protection of minorities. They require a functioning market economy. And they require the ability to take on the obligations of EU membership, including adherence to the EU’s legal framework on human rights, labour standards, and anti-discrimination.

Turkey has been in accession negotiations since 1999. In that time it has moved not toward those criteria but away from them. Press freedom in Turkey ranks among the lowest in Europe. Erdogan’s government has jailed more journalists than any other country in the world in multiple recent years. The rule of law has deteriorated sharply since the 2016 coup attempt, after which more than 150,000 people were detained, dismissed, or suspended, including judges, academics, military officers, and civil servants, in a purge whose scale and speed made judicial process impossible. Kurdish political parties have been suppressed, their elected representatives jailed, their municipalities placed under government-appointed trustees. The opposition candidate who won the Istanbul mayoral election in 2019 had his victory annulled and was forced to stand again, winning by a larger margin, before Erdogan’s government accepted the result.

Against this background, the EU has not suspended Turkey’s candidacy. It has described the accession process as frozen, a diplomatic formulation that means Turkey remains a candidate, continues to receive pre-accession funding, and retains the symbolic and practical benefits of candidate status, while the EU avoids the confrontation that formal suspension would require.

The reason for this avoidance is not subtle. Turkey hosts approximately 3.6 million Syrian refugees. In 2016, the EU paid Turkey six billion euros under the EU-Turkey Statement to prevent those refugees from moving into Europe. The payment was described as support for refugee management. It was in practical terms a payment to a country that ranked fifth in the world for modern slavery to continue hosting people who were, as we have seen, significantly represented in that country’s modern slavery statistics.

The EU is not confused about Turkey’s human rights record. It publishes annual progress reports that document, in careful bureaucratic language, the deterioration of press freedom, judicial independence, minority rights, and civil society space. Those reports sit alongside the accession candidacy as though they described a different country. They describe the same country. The institutional decision to maintain the candidacy despite the reports is not an oversight. It is a choice about which facts are allowed to have consequences.

The Suppression You Are Not Supposed to Name

Here is the question that Western institutional discourse cannot bring itself to ask directly: is Turkey’s position on the slavery index connected to the system of governance that Turkey practices and the civilizational inheritance from which that governance draws?

The Walk Free Index notes that Turkey is among the countries taking the least action to respond to modern slavery. This is not a failure of awareness. Turkey has ratified international conventions. Turkey has a functioning legal system. Turkey has government ministries with portfolios that include human rights. What Turkey does not have is a tradition of grassroots civil society movements that challenge the state on these questions from the bottom up and are permitted to survive.

The women’s rights movements that drove slavery abolition in the West emerged from a specific civilizational context. They required the freedom to organize, to publish, to protest, to petition. They required institutions that treated conscience as a private matter not subject to state enforcement. They required a legal tradition that recognized the individual as the fundamental unit of moral concern rather than the community or the umma. None of those prerequisites are reliably present in Turkey, and under Erdogan’s AKP government they have been contracting rather than expanding.

When Turkish feminist organizations protest, they are dispersed. When Turkish journalists report on human trafficking, they face legal jeopardy. When academics publish on minority rights, they lose their positions. The Istanbul Convention on violence against women, which Turkey had championed, was withdrawn by presidential decree in 2021. The reason given was that it threatened family values and promoted homosexuality. The women who had organized for years to build that protection framework had no institutional recourse.

This is the pattern that Western progressives who march for Palestine and chant about liberation cannot bring themselves to examine. The movements they belong to, feminism, LGBTQ advocacy, bodily autonomy activism, secular humanism, atheism, did not emerge under Islamic governance. They could not have. Unorthodoxy is suppressed there. Not marginalized, not underfunded, suppressed. The grassroots organizing that produced every progressive social movement of the last two centuries required soil that Islamic governance, in its classical and its contemporary forms, does not provide.

Atheism did not grow into a movement under the Ottoman caliphate. Feminism did not incubate in the harem. Gay rights did not emerge from a legal tradition that treats homosexuality as a capital offense. Every one of those movements owes its existence to a civilization built on the premise that individual conscience is sacred and that the state’s authority over it is limited. That premise has a specific historical address. It is not Istanbul. It is not Riyadh. It is the tradition shaped by a theology that distinguished between the kingdom of God and the kingdoms of men, and that insisted the individual soul answers to God directly, without the mediation of a state apparatus that claims to speak for Him.

The progressives who are currently most vocal about dismantling that tradition while celebrating the tradition that would have suppressed them at birth are not making an argument. They are making a confession. They are confessing that they do not understand where they came from, what produced them, or what would happen to them if the civilizational balance they are disrupting were to tip the other way.

Turkey is first in Europe for modern slavery. The EU is still processing the accession application. The progressives are still marching.

The 1.3 million people in bondage are not marching anywhere. They have no one organizing on their behalf. The movements that should be loudest are the quietest. And the civilization that built those movements is being dismantled by the people it produced.

We will return to that silence in the pieces that follow, because it deserves more than a paragraph and it is going to get one.

What the Data Requires

The Walk Free Index is not a polemical document. It is a careful, methodology-driven attempt to count people who have lost their freedom. Its finding that Turkey ranks fifth in the world is not a political statement. It is a measurement.

What the measurement requires is honest engagement. It requires the EU to answer the question of how a country with 1.3 million modern slaves in a population of 84 million qualifies for candidate status on the basis of its commitment to European values. It requires the fashion industry to audit its Turkish supply chains with the same rigor it claims to apply everywhere else. It requires the progressive movements that claim to speak for the oppressed to explain why the oppression of 1.3 million people in a majority-Muslim country produces less outrage than a social media post they disagree with.

And it requires the people who consume those fashion supply chains, who shop the Turkish brands, who buy the chocolate that contains the hazelnuts, who buy the cotton products that may carry forced labour from two countries in a single shirt, to understand that their purchasing decisions are not neutral. They are a vote. They are a vote for the continuation of a system that the institutions they trust have decided not to challenge.

The Ottoman Empire ended in 1922. Its institutional inheritance did not.

The 1.3 million are still waiting for someone to notice. And the movements that built their careers on the language of liberation have been remarkably quiet about it.

In the next piece we ask why. Because Turkey is not only first in Europe for modern slavery. Turkey is also doing what Turkey has always done to the people on its borders. And this time, nobody is calling it a genocide.

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Sources:

Walk Free Foundation. Global Slavery Index 2023: Turkey Country Study. walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/country-studies/turkiye/

Bianet. “Turkey Comes Fifth in the World and First in Europe in Modern Slavery.” May 25, 2023. bianet.org/haber/turkey-comes-fifth-in-the-world-and-first-in-europe-in-modern-slavery-279279

Anti-Slavery International. “Forced Labour Tainted Cotton: From Turkmenistan via Turkey.” April 5, 2019. antislavery.org/latest/forced-labour-tainted-cotton-from-turkmenistan-via-turkey/

World History Edu. “Slavery in the Ottoman Empire: History and Major Facts.” April 13, 2024. worldhistoryedu.com/slavery-in-the-ottoman-empire-history-and-major-facts/

Human Rights Watch. “Turkey: Syrians in Dire Conditions.” 2022.

US State Department Trafficking in Persons Report: Turkey. 2023.

International Labour Organization. “Syrian Refugees and the Turkish Labour Market.” 2022.

European Commission. Turkey 2023 Report. neighbourhood-enlargement.ec.europa.eu

Global Commission on Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking. No Country Is Immune. 2025. modernslaverycommission.org

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