FOREWORD
In a country like Turkey where the Human Rights Association has been active for almost a quarter of a century and the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey, which was established by this legal entity, has completed its 21st year, it is getting more and more difficult to speak of the improvements in human rights. The picture presented in this report is a clear documentation of the fact that the political will is drifted to a direction where the human rights are once again ignored for creating the unprecedented examples of the contemporary security engineering alleged to be a necessity for this land, besides demonstrating that the concept of human rights is not one of its priorities. As you can also tell from my depiction above, this time this drifting will not be – and is not – as easy as it had been in the past for today’s political will.
Among the achievements of the human rights struggle in Turkey over decades, the acceptance that torture exists as an undeniable fact by all layers of then society and the substantial level of awareness for claiming rights have a significant place. Here, we are talking about a human rights struggle that is tried by disappearances, unsolved killings, mass massacres, threats and captivity. The point that this struggle has reached today is undoubtedly way ahead of where it started. However “being ahead” is relative and it has not reached the point of realizing what should be in the name of human rights. Only when we bring together the pieces that not only several representatives of the society from journalists to lawyers, from politicians to students but also some of the leading figures of the human rights struggle are held captive, it will be easier to understand the picture presented by our data both on general human rights violations and also as filtered under the heading of “torture”.
Unfortunately, people of all walks of life, of all ages and of all sexual identities living in this country are still a potential target of the violence exerted by the law-enforcement forces and yet two striking characteristics of 2011 are that the number of applicants in the child age group has increased almost two folds in the past 5 years and more importantly that the number of the estimated applications based on the data of previous years were exceeded by 60% in 2011 and was 519.
Despite the fact that the applications to the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey constitute only a limited part of the total number of torture victims, however, it is useful to a meaningful picture of the human rights violations. It should also be emphasized that our foundation’s efficient performance and the efforts to reach the torture victims over the last years had effect on the number of applications increased beyond expectations.
In this regard;
– the visits of the mobile teams for the regions that we do not have any treatment centres, which are started in 2009 and also continued in 2011: during these visits alone a total of 37 torture victims were included in the treatment and rehabilitation programme in 2011;
– the legal support and “social support” programmes for the torture victims, which are re-started within 2009 and still on-going: within this scope, the inclusion of 5 applicants in the legal support programme and of 14 adults and 54 children in the social support programme has lead to an increase in the expected number of applications for this year and yet this is not sufficient to explain the increase in numbers on its own.
In Turkey, we are witnessing an ever-strengthening attitude of intolerance in the current political climate and political will against the opposition based on the apperception of confidence boosted with the last election results. This “confidence” leading to a panorama of human rights violations sustained by the demonstration of an aggressive attitude in a wide range of areas from streets to prisons and the explicit approval of and support to such aggression by all the actors symbolizing the true identity of the political will, can also be taken as an expression of lack of self- confidence. In this land and in an era when it is revealed that the truth swept under the rug for many generations can no longer remain there and when the demand for truth is expressed by all even stronger, their incapability to tackle the problem areas using democratic methods due to their political identity, seem to lie behind their aroused response to such problem areas, and hence their aggressive suppression in all problems. And such an attitude can only be explained with a kind of despair and lack of self-confidence.
In this past year which was full of deaths caused by their raging attacks against the demonstrations, massacres and torture practices strongly backed up by impunity, we also observed that all of these human rights violations were better detected and discussed with raised voices.
With regard to the visibility of the human rights violations, despite the fact that the mainstream media remained tightly held on its usual stance, we can say that the alternative news sources and the social media is fulfilling an important function and thus these channels of communication are now more frequently used for reference. A major source of information for these channels is the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey.
It should be noted that the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey has become a major reference centre not only in this country but also in the world in the recent years. Bearing also in mind that the foundation has been delivering training in many countries from the Middle East to Asia and from Europe to America, it is also our binding duty to institutionalize this expertise in the shortest time possible.
I would like to lastly reiterate that we are infinitely grateful to all the staff of the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey and the undaunted actors of the human rights struggle who have spent enormous efforts to lay the stones one by one for realizing a world where human rights are effectively claimed and have unconditionally and unsparingly worked and that I hold the firm belief that we can altogether build a world without torture.