Following a string of purges in the wake of the failed 2016 coup in Turkey, hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs, and tens of thousands more were arrested. Many political opponents of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan fled the country. A partisan judicial system, along with reports of torture in Turkish jails, provided sufficient grounds for many European states to disallow the extradition of Turkish citizens to their home country, even when they were wanted for arrest by Interpol.