Istanbul trials of 1919–1920 in the context of "Enver Pasha"

After World War I, the effort to prosecute Ottoman war criminals was taken up by the Paris Peace Conference (1919) and ultimately included in the Treaty of Sèvres (1920) with the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman government organized a series of courts martial in 1919–1920 to prosecute war criminals, but these failed on account of political pressure. The main effort by the Allied administration that occupied Constantinople fell short of establishing an international tribunal in Malta to try the so-called Malta exiles, Ottoman war criminals held as POWs by the British forces in Malta. In the end, no tribunals were held in Malta.

Taner Akçam states that protecting war criminals from prosecution became a key priority of the Turkish nationalist movement. According to European Court of Human Rights judge Giovanni Bonello the suspension of prosecutions, the repatriation and release of Turkish detainees was amongst others a result of the lack of an appropriate legal framework with supranational jurisdiction, because following World War I no international norms for regulating war crimes existed. The release of the Turkish detainees was accomplished in exchange for 22 British prisoners held by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

The Freedom and Accord Party (Ottoman Turkish: حریت و ایتلاف فرقه‌سی, romanized: Hürriyet ve İtilâf Fırkası, French: Entente Libérale) was a liberal Ottoman political party active between 1911–1913 and 1918–1919, during the Second Constitutional Era. It was the most significant opposition to Committee of Union and Progress (CUP). The political programme of the party advocated for Ottomanism, government decentralisation, the rights of ethnic minorities, and close relations with Britain. In the post-1918 Ottoman Empire, the party became known for its attempts to suppress and prosecute the CUP.

In both of its periods of existence, the party struggled with internal divisions among its diverse factions, resulting in a disorganised opposition to the CUP.