Although scholars, politicians and activists have dedicated great attention to questions of human rights practices in Turkey, the history of the country’s human rights movement has received less attention. This paper examines the emergence of a human rights movement in the immediate postwar period that broadly coincided with the formation of the United Nations and the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Genocide Convention in December 1948. This paper finds that Turkey’s early Cold War conceptualization of human rights continues to resonate in its contemporary approach to human rights. Within Turkey, two human rights groups, one official and the other private, vied for influence in the immediate postwar period. Global human rights discourse also added pressure to Turkey’s single-party government as the country transitioned to multiparty politics. At the same time, the launch of Turkey’s first human rights organizations coincided with staunch anticommunist measures. As outside Greek, Armenian, Jewish and Kurdish groups, as well as the Soviet Union, criticized Turkey’s treatment of minorities, the human rights movement was quickly overtaken by the fight against communism and criticism of minorities’ troubles was rendered mute. The Turkish leadership’s solution to the problem of how to bridge a postwar global discourse of human rights with its Cold War national security emphasis was to promote a new, version of nationalism that coincided with and supported the Truman Doctrine. Yet, this reformulation was tenuous at best. Rather than fostering a serious discussion about minority or human rights, Turkish officials reduced enduring problems in Turkey’s treatment of minorities to a component of Soviet territorial claims on Turkey. At the same time, Turkey’s governments continued to criticize human rights abuses against Turkic minorities under communism. This paper ultimately offers insight on the history of human rights in Turkey, Turkey’s treatment of minorities and its experience of the Cold War.