This is the full picture Turkey now offers the EU: a privatised border system that enriches the politically-connected, a Big Tech infrastructure that executes censorship on demand, and the rule of law being methodically hollowed out.
Emre Kizilkaya
In late May, the independent Turkish newsroom Kısa Dalga began publishing a five-part investigation into how Schengen visa applications really work in Turkey, tracing links between a former Turkish foreign minister, a businessman named in the Paradise Papers leaks, and the transformation of an air-conditioning vendor operating out of an Istanbul apartment into the gatekeeper of Turkey’s lucrative visa market.
Within hours, a Turkish court banned access to the series, citing “national security and public order.”
The newsroom deemed the ban unconstitutional, and the Vienna-based International Press Institute (IPI) condemned the use of “arbitrary court orders to censor independent journalism.”
Digital platforms, including X and several Turkish news websites, quickly complied with the censorship order. Even the X posts that included archived web URLs of the publication were later blocked by the same court, said Canan Coşkun, the Turkish reporter of the series.
An ordinary Turkish citizen can now barely find the traces of this important piece of journalism on social media or on Google.
The reporting was the Turkish chapter of “The Visa Empire: Borders as a Business”, a year-long international investigation by Lighthouse Reports and 14 media outlets into VFS Global, the world’s largest visa-outsourcing firm.
The journalism consortium, drawing on internal EU documents, financial statements and dozens of interviews, described a global company whose profits quadrupled between 2017 and 2024. It documented aggressive upselling of supposedly optional extras, staff bonuses tied to sales targets, exposure to bribery, and what experts described as manifestly serious violations of the EU’s GDPR data protection.
VFS denies wrongdoing, saying that any suggestion that its growth “has been generated through improper conduct is false.”
The Turkish reporting is even more alarming.
It documented how VFS’s local subcontractor, Gateway, rose from an obscure air-conditioning business into the dominant intermediary controlling access to Turkey’s Schengen visa system.
Its owner, Halis Ali Cakmak, was named in the Paradise Papers leaks alongside Maltese offshore entities — which he has denied.
A 2019 regulation gave Turkey’s foreign minister personal authority to designate visa intermediaries. At the time, that minister was Mevlut Cavusoglu, whom Cakmak had publicly thanked for an earlier visa mandate in Iraq. Cakmak’s holding later took over the running of a university founded by a foundation where Cavusoglu sat as a trustee, and whose board included the minister’s wife.
By Cakmak’s own account, a fifth of the revenue from VFS’s add-on services in Turkey flowed to the foreign ministry and now goes to a foundation created to support it.
‘Quiet extortion’
For Schengen visa applicants, the result is quiet extortion. Appointments on the supposed “first-come, first-served” booking system are nearly impossible to find, while a black market sells slots for €300 or more.
Travel insurance from companies owned by the same subcontractor is presented as a de facto requirement. One applicant who paid extra for a “Premium Lounge” described staff discussing finances within earshot of strangers, then instructing applicants to photograph a system password on their own phone. VFS’s Turkey chief told Kısa Dalga that Gateway is “a subcontractor, not a partner”; Cakmak replied that VFS exists in Turkey “because of us.”
When I approached VFS’s Turkey operation about these findings, they called me, then decided not to comment.
This is not just a Turkish story.
Turks now file more Schengen applications than any nationality except Chinese citizens, nearly 1.3 million in 2025, while the rejection rate has climbed from 4.4 percent in 2014 to 14.6 percent in 2025, after peaking above 16 percent.
Over 16 years, EU states have rejected more than one million applications from Turkey and, because fees are never refunded, retained roughly €73m from those rejections alone.
Every barrier falls hardest on the people Europe claims to support: journalists, academics and civil society actors.
The frustration is amplified by comparison with other neighbouring states.
The European Commission says visa liberalisation has already been completed by Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine, while the EU-Turkey visa liberalisation dialogue, launched in 2013, still has unfulfilled requirements.
The system also produces a political asymmetry inside Turkey.
Its hardest effects fall on the educated urban middle class, especially journalists, academics, students and professionals whose lives and work are most connected to Europe.
By contrast, politically connected actors often have access to service passports, sometimes called “gray passports,” issued through public institutions, a privilege that reduces or removes the burden ordinary applicants face.
I have worked as a journalist for more than 20 years and have travelled to EU countries dozens of times without incident.
But my own experience now looks less like the rule than the exception, given the repeated complaints from Turkish journalists in recent years.
In March, 18 press freedom and human rights organisations, including IPI, wrote a joint letter to EU leaders about the visa wall isolating Turkish journalists: six-month waits for appointments, arbitrary refusals and crushing costs.
EU inaction on visa liberalisation
The Lighthouse findings suggest we should also have been looking at the privatised, politically-connected layer standing between applicants and the consulate door, a monopoly the EU itself helped create when it outsourced its borders.
EU law obliges member states to monitor outsourced visa providers closely and regularly. The consortium’s documents show governments know about persistent failures and rarely act.
The European Commission and member states should urgently audit subcontracting chains and conflicts of interest behind every Schengen contract, enforce data protection rules and refund fees when applications are rejected.
The EU should also rethink its visa-waiver and facilitation policy for Turkey so that it recognises the democratic public interest in mobility, especially for journalists, academics, and civil society.
To reduce both arbitrary refusals and the burden of proof on individual applicants, EU consulates should be empowered to consult reputable international press freedom organisations when verifying an applicant’s professional status as a journalist.
The favoured political class around president Recep Tayyip Erdogan does not face the same burden, since it can rely on service passports and other institutional exemptions; hence, there is little incentive for it to make progress with the EU in the 13-year-old visa liberalisation dialogue.
The second failure belongs to Silicon Valley.
Big Tech censorship
By complying within hours with a baseless censorship order, X and other platforms became instruments of the very network the journalism exposed. A local court silences reporting, and global corporations execute the sentence.
This “dual domination” that I investigated in a recent discussion paper for Harvard University’s Carr-Ryan Center is a problem only a coordinated response from the democratic public can solve.
More than an exception, Turkey now offers another warning to the EU: when Europe privatises its borders and Big Tech blindly colludes in censorship, the politically connected elite in the EU’s periphery captures even more power in shady ways.
To understand why that response is now urgent, consider what the censorship of the Visa Empire investigation sits alongside.
Istanbul mayor Ekrem Imamoglu — widely seen as Erdogan’s biggest rival ahead of the next presidential election — has spent over a year in pre-trial detention on charges that legal experts describe as politically motivated “lawfare.”
In late May, a Turkish appeals court went further, annulling the 2023 congress of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) and effectively reinstating as interim party leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu, a controversial politician who had led the opposition to multiple electoral defeats.
The same machinery targets critical journalism: senior editor Merdan Yanardag remains jailed, while award-winning reporters such as Ismail Ari, Alican Uludag and Furkan Karabay were released only recently.
This is the full picture Turkey now offers the EU: a privatised border system that enriches the politically connected, a Big Tech infrastructure that executes censorship on demand, and the rule of law being methodically hollowed out.
While ordinary people pay the price, accountability never gets a hearing.
