Human Rights in Turkey, or lack thereof

[Boghos]

World Report 2002

 

Turkey http://www.hrw.org/wr2k2/europe19.html

 

 

HUMAN RIGHTS DEVELOPMENTS

 

The strongly nationalist ruling coalition of the Democratic Left

Party, Nationalist Action Party, and Motherland Party once again

failed to enact key reforms in the face of longstanding opposition to

these measures by the army and security forces. The government's

National Program for Accession to the European Union should have

marked a turning point for human rights, but consisted mainly of vague

and general undertakings that were clearly designed to delay or avoid

significant change. In June the Constitutional Court closed the

religious Virtue Party for "actions against the republic's secular

principles." An opportunity for significant change was missed in

October, when a package of constitutional amendments were enacted that

shortened detention periods, but left the death penalty and

constraints on freedom of expression on the statute books. Three

provinces remained under state of emergency. In December, security

forces deliberately killed prisoners resisting transfers to new high

security "F-type prisons," and beat them in transit. Thirty-three

prisoners died in hunger strikes.

 

The Turkish government talked about lifting constraints on free

expression, but did not take effective legislative action to do

so. Those who challenged the official view of the role of religion,

ethnicity, and the army were prosecuted and imprisoned. In June,

Dr. Fikret Baskaya began serving his third prison term for his

writings, a sixteen-month sentence for "separatist propaganda" under

article 8 of the Anti-Terror Law, for a 1999 newspaper article about

the trial of Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Turan

Demir, deputy chairperson of the People's Democracy Party (HADEP)

which has a largely Kurdish membership, was committed to Ankara Closed

Prison in August to serve a one-year sentence under article 8 of the

Anti-Terror Law for a speech at his party's youth congress in 1998.

 

Military courts tried civilians on charges limiting free

expression. In December Sanar Yurdatapan, coordinator of the Freedom

of Expression Initiative, and Nevzat Onaran of the Contemporary

Journalists' Association were imprisoned by the General Staff Military

Court with two-month sentences for "criticizing the institution of

military service."

 

Governors closed exhibitions, banned film shows, and confiscated books

and newspapers. In August police confiscated the Women Pensioners'

Union booklet Voice and Courage, which published speeches from a

conference on sexual assault and rape in custody, and officials of the

group were charged with "insulting the security forces."

 

The High Council for Radio and Television (R.T.U.K.) temporarily or

permanently suspended scores of independent broadcasters and in August

banned BBC World Service and Deutsche Welle on the grounds that they

"threatened national security."

 

Various legal pretexts were used to prevent broadcasting and education

in minority languages, calling into question whether the 2001

constitutional amendments ostensibly lifting the broadcasting ban

would be fully implemented. Local governors prohibited the use of

Kurdish street names and banned plays, cassettes, and films in Kurdish

on the grounds that they were "separatist."

 

The ban on wearing the headscarf was applied with increasing severity

against students and civil servants and extended to private

universities. A change in regulations prohibited any student wearing a

headscarf from sitting for the June university examinations, a move

that human rights groups criticized as violating the students' right

to freedom of religion, conscience, and thought. Teachers and doctors

were also dismissed for wearing the headscarf on duty.

 

Many lawyers and human rights defenders charged that the use of

torture and ill-treatment increased. Detainees in all quarters of the

country reported that police or gendarmes inflicted torture by

beating, death threats, hosing with cold water, sexual assault,

electric shocks, and hanging by the arms. Victims included women and

children, and people detained for common criminal offenses as well as

State Security Court (SSC) offenses (those involving narcotics and

organized crime, political violence, and some nonviolent political

offenses). Two people died as a result of beatings during arrest.

 

The Turkish government refused to abolish incommunicado detention, the

principal factor in the persistence of torture in Turkey identified by

U.N. and Council of Europe experts. Turkish law continued to permit

detention for SSC offenses for up to four days without access to

family or lawyers. In practice this was frequently extended. Those

held for common criminal offenses were entitled to a lawyer from the

first moments of detention but rarely got one. Blindfolding, similarly

condemned by international experts, also continued unchecked.

 

Legal safeguards for children in police custody were frequently

ignored. In March, parliamentary deputy Sema Piskinsary, nine children

under the age of fifteen complained that they had been beaten, forced

to remain standing for long periods, and deprived of food, drink and

sleep while detained in Viransehir in the province of Sanlžurfa

in southeast Turkey. Local lawyers complained about the ill-treatment

and breach of detention procedures, but as of November 2001 no action

had been taken against the responsible police officers. A

fifteen-year-old detained in April during an Istanbul demonstration

against F-type prisons reported that police officers beat him with

wooden sticks about the head and body. Medical examination showed

extensive bruising and broken teeth.

 

Women reported sexual abuse and rape in police custody. The Women's

Commission of the Diyarbakžr Bar stated in February that over the

preceding year it had received complaints of sexual assault or rape by

police or gendarmes from 123 women. In July, Health Minister Osman

Durmus issued a circular which appeared to circumvent a 1999 ban on

"virginity examinations" by providing for the expulsion of female

medical students proven to be sexually active or engaged in

prostitution. The minister later denied that he had authorized the

reinstatement of such examinations, but did not rescind the

circular. A sixteen-year-old in Van reported that in June she was

taken from a gendarmerie post, where she was being questioned for

alleged links with the PKK, to a state hospital and there subjected to

a forced "virginity test."

 

The climate of impunity for torture remained unchanged. Where security

personnel were charged and convicted of crimes based on torture,

sentences were frequently light or suspended. In February a policeman

convicted of torturing a thirteen-year-old boy in Istanbul in 1994

received a suspended sentence of fifteen months' imprisonment and

returned to active service. In August the Turkish Parliamentary Human

Rights Commission reported that it had forwarded 451 torture cases to

local prosecutors, who had responded in only sixty-nine cases. Only

one prosecution had been opened. The December 2000 Law on Conditional

Release and Suspension of Sentences, resulting in the release of

thousands of prisoners held on common criminal charges, also suspended

sentences for police officers convicted of ill-treatment under article

245 of the Turkish Criminal Code.

 

Torturers continued to be protected by the abuse of medical

examination procedures. In December, Dr. Nur Birgen, a Forensic

Institute official, was convicted of issuing misleading reports that

concealed torture. Her three-month prison sentence was commuted to a

fine of approximately one U.S. dollar.

 

HADEP officials Serdar Tanžs and Ebubekir Deniz "disappeared"

after being summoned to a gendarmerie station in Silopi, Sžrnak

province, in January. The authorities first denied and then admitted

that the two men "visited" the gendarmerie, but claimed they had left

after half an hour.

 

The Justice Ministry moved forward with its long-planned transfer of

prisoners held for SSC offenses from large ward-based prisons to new

F-type prisons organized in smaller cells for up to three

prisoners. The ministry ignored warnings from nongovernmental and

international organizations that the planned F-type regime might

amount to cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment and that the lack of

transparency surrounding the prison reform risked exacerbating

prisoners' fears. In December, the government launched "Operation

Return to Life," sending 10,000 soldiers into twenty ward-based

prisons to transfer hunger-striking prisoners into small-group

isolation in the newly constructed F-type prisons. The operation left

twenty-eight prisoners and two gendarmes dead. Some prisoners burned

themselves in protest, but others were deliberately killed by security

forces. Gendarmes beat and tortured prisoners during transfer and on

arrival at the F-type prisons. Eight male prisoners formally

complained that gendarmes anally raped them with truncheons on arrival

at Kandžra F-type Prison, but they were not medically examined

for three weeks.

 

Complaints that F-type prison guards maintained discipline through

beatings were corroborated by medical evidence in several cases. In

February, Sabri Diri made a formal complaint that guards at Tekirdag

F-type Prison twice beat him and subjected him to falaqa (beating on

the soles of the feet) in his single cell. A medical examination

delayed for a week showed no signs of ill-treatment but a June medical

examination using scintigraphy, an imaging technique, revealed

evidence consistent with Sabri Diri's allegation of falaka and

beating. As of October 2001, thirty-three prisoners and eight

relatives had died in hunger strikes in protest at the F-type

regime. More than fifty other hunger strikers suffered severe and

permanent brain damage.

 

More than 250,000 mainly Kurdish villagers remained unable to return

to their homes in the southeast, despite the substantial reduction in

hostilities between government forces and the PKK in that region. The

vast majority had been forced from their homes in the early and

mid-1990s by security forces in brutal operations accompanied by

torture and "disappearances." A smaller number had fled their villages

after repeated PKK attacks. Returns were slow due to apparent

official reluctance to repopulate distant rural areas. Where civil

authorities granted permission to return, villagers were sometimes

turned back by gendarmerie or neighboring communities' paramilitary

village guards who had occupied their lands.

 

Sporadic forced evacuation and house destruction actually

continued. Following the death of a gendarme in a landmine explosion

near Beytl killed Australian tourist Amanda Rigg and two Anti-Riot

Squad officers. A fifteen-year-old was killed and three other

schoolchildren injured in an attack on the extreme right Idealist

Hearth in Istanbul. Official reports claimed the attack was committed

by the Turkish Communist Labour Party (TKEP).

 

Asylum seekers were frequently denied proper protection. Under

Turkey's geographical reservation to the 1951 Refugee Convention,

non-European asylum seekers were required to register with the police

so that the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) could

determine whether they were refugees and eligible for resettlement in

a third country. Hundreds of asylum seekers entering the country from

Iran and northern Iraq were summarily returned across the

borders. Others were arbitrarily refused permission to register or to

report weekly to police stations, thereby exposing them to risk of

summary return as illegal residents. In July more than two hundred

African asylum seekers, including some recognized by UNHCR as

refugees, were rounded up in Istanbul. One female member of the group

died in custody, while others reported that gendarmes ill-treated,

raped, or otherwise sexual assaulted them before forcing them at

gunpoint across the Greek border.

 

Landmines laid by the government along the borders and by both sides

in the conflict between the security forces and the PKK, killed at

least ten people. In April, however, Turkey declared that it would

begin procedures to accede to the Ottawa Convention on the prohibition

of production and use of anti-personnel mines.

 

 

DEFENDING HUMAN RIGHTS

 

Prime Minister Bant towards civil society organizations," but also

said that members of such organizations did not deserve to be called

human rights defenders.

 

Human rights organizations saw little benefit from the circular. In

September, police raided the Diyarbakir referral center for the

treatment of torture survivors run by the Turkish Human Rights

Foundation (TIHV) and carried off computers, patient files, and

information about assisting doctors. In March, nineteen participants

in a conference on sexual assault and rape in custody were put on

trial for "insulting the State authorities" at Beyoglu Criminal

Court. Nazli Top, who was tortured and raped with a truncheon in

police custody in 1992, was a speaker at the June 2000 conference and

a defendant in the ongoing trial.

 

The F-type prison crisis and associated hunger strikes imposed

considerable strain on the human rights community. Government

authorities relentlessly persecuted TIHV, Human Rights Association

(HRA), and Turkish Medical Association members who were stretching

their resources to the limit in order to document abuses, ensure

supplies of vitamins and clothing to F-type inmates, and provide

support to the relatives of sick, dead, and dying prisoners. Five HRA

branches were shut down by local governors because of their work on

F-type prisons. HRA members were repeatedly beaten and detained when

they tried to make public press statements. The Justice Ministry

announced that providing information about the hunger strikes was

"supporting terrorism." Accordingly, Ankara HRA branch president Lutfi

Demirkapž and eleven others were charged in March under the

Anti-Terror Law for their defense of human rights and face possible

seven and a half year prison sentences. Their trial at Ankara SSC was

under way as of this writing.

 

In October, Yeni Safak (New Dawn) published an April 1998 memorandum

from the military's Office of the Chief of General Staff, outlining a

military plan to discredit the HRA with false information linking it

to the PKK. The military did not deny the April 1998 memorandum's

authenticity but claimed it was never implemented. However, an attempt

on HRA president Akžn Birdal's life in May 1998 was provoked by

the type of groundless accusations contemplated in the

memorandum. Birdal barely survived the attack, which left him

disabled.

 

 

THE ROLE OF THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY

 

 

United Nations

 

In January, the U.N. special rapporteur on religious intolerance and

discrimination published a report on his 1999 visit to Turkey. The

report strongly questioned the Turkish Republic's view of itself as a

secular state, stating that the Directorate of Religious Affairs

wields "excessive powers of religious management such that religious

practice appears to be regimented by the government and Islam is

treated as if it were a 'State affair.'"

 

The report noted that Muslim and non-Muslim religious minorities were

not satisfactorily protected and recommended that the U.N. Working

Group on Minorities review the effectiveness of safeguards provided by

the Treaty of Lausanne, the foundation for Turkey's policies towards

minorities. The special rapporteur also urged recognition of the right

to conscientious objection.

 

The February visit of the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial,

arbitrary and summary executions included investigations into the

"disappearance" of HADEP officials Serdar Tanžs and Abubekir

Deniz.

 

In June the Committee on the Rights of the Child recommended that the

Turkish government introduce legislative changes and an awareness

campaign in order to combat "honor killings," the murder of women by

family members who believe that they have been dishonored by the

woman's conduct. The committee was also "extremely concerned" that

children were being exposed to torture and ill-treatment as a result

of incommunicado police detention.

 

 

Council of Europe

 

The Committee for the Prevention of Torture (C.P.T.) concertedly

engaged the Justice Ministry on the violence of the December prison

operation, isolation in F-type prisons, and associated hunger

strikes. The C.P.T. visited Turkey in December just before the

operation, attempting to resolve hunger strikes that started in

October. It visited again in January, April, and September.

 

The Turkish government authorized the committee's publication of all

outstanding reports visits dating back to 1990. The C.P.T. did not

oppose the change from large wards to cells but emphasized that

small-group isolation in F-type prisons was "not acceptable" and urged

the Justice Ministry to establish out-of-cell activities and

independent monitoring.

 

In a number of judgments the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR)

ruled that Turkish security forces had been responsible for arbitrary

house destruction, torture, "disappearance," and extrajudicial

execution in their operations in the southeast.

 

The ECHR's controversial judgment in July rejected the Welfare Party's

complaint against closure by the Turkish Constitutional Court for

"activities against the principle of secularism" in 1998. The European

Court considered that the party leadership's intention to establish

Islamic law (shariah) conflicted with values embodied in the

convention, and that statements by the leadership suggested that it

might resort to force in order to gain and retain power. In the same

month the court ruled that Kurdish former parliamentary deputies Hatip

Dicle, Orhan Dogan, Selim Sadak, and Leyla Zana, sentenced to fifteen

years for treason in 1994, had been imprisoned after an unfair trial.

 

 

European Union

 

The E.U. Presidency's May statement on the prison crisis urged the

Turkish government to implement "generously and properly" the C.P.T.'s

suggested steps and underlined that prison reform was a priority area

for meeting the accession criteria. In June, a European Parliament

delegation visited Turkey to investigate developments in F-type

prisons.

 

The European Parliament's October 2000 report on the accession process

criticized the vagueness of the National Plan and noted that "the

signs of openness which are on occasion expressed by governmental

authorities may be challenged by military powers, which still have an

unusual influence on Turkish politics." The European Commission's

November 2001 Regular Report concluded that on human rights, "the

situation on the ground has hardly improved."

 

 

United States

 

The State Department's Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for

2000 surveyed the continuing abuses, giving examples of restrictions

on speech and the press, extrajudicial killings and torture. The

report blamed incommunicado detention and impunity for the persistence

of torture. It documented child labor, violence against women, and

spousal abuse.

 

Its description of "an upsurge in the rate of returns" of displaced

Kurdish villagers gave a more optimistic picture than warranted. The

conclusion, apparently based on official Turkish government

pronouncements, was not borne out by Human Rights Watch

investigations. The State Department's Trafficking in Persons Report

stated that Turkey did not meet the minimum standards nor had it made

significant efforts to combat trafficking of women and girls to Turkey

for forced prostitution.

 

Technical issues slowed contractual negotiations on the sale of 145

attack helicopters to Turkey by U.S. manufacturer Bell Textron. This

class of equipment was implicated in past human rights violations in

Turkey, making the pending sale, which is subject to U.S.

Congressional approval, highly controversial in the United States.