Police arrested more than 50 people in Istanbul on Sunday ahead of a banned LGBTQ+ Pride march, the city’s bar association said.

“Before today’s Istanbul Pride march, four of our colleagues, including members of our Human Rights Centre, along with more than 50 people, were deprived of their liberty through arbitrary, unjust, and illegal detention,” the Istanbul Bar’s Human Rights Centre posted on X.

Earlier on Sunday, police arrested protesters near the central Ortaköy district, AFP journalists observed on the scene.

Once a lively affair with thousands of marchers, Istanbul Pride has been banned each year since 2015 by Turkey’s ruling conservative government.

“These calls, which undermine social peace, family structure, and moral values, are prohibited,” Istanbul’s governor, Davut Gül, had warned on X on Saturday.

“No gathering or march that threatens public order will be tolerated,” he added.

Taksim Square, one of the city’s main venues for protests, celebrations and rallies, was blocked off by police from early on Sunday.

One protester chanted, “We didn’t give up, we came, we believed, we are here,” as she and a dozen others ran to avoid arrest, according to a video posted on X.

Homosexuality is not criminalised in Turkey, but homophobia is widespread. It reaches even the highest levels of government, with the president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, regularly describing LGBTQ+ people as “perverts” and a threat to the traditional family.

The banning of Istanbul pride follows the failure of Hungary’s conservative leader, Viktor Orbán, to prevent his country’s main pride parade from going ahead.

An estimated 200,000 people, a record, marched in the Budapest Pride parade Saturday, defying a ban by Orbán’s government.