For the past 20 years, Can Atalay has been present wherever there has been an aggrievement. As a lawyer, he defended the friends and families of the miners that died at Soma, those who lost their lives in the explosion at Hendek and at the Çorlu train massacre, and the children that were burned to death at the Aladağ sect dormitory. He was involved in the solidarity networks formed against the destruction of the Validebağ Grove and the demolition of the Emek Movie Theater.
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The co-rapporteurs for the monitoring of Turkey by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe have appealed to Turkey’s authorities to find a solution to the Kavala case which is in line with an earlier ruling of the European Court of Human Rights.
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Police in Turkey broke up an LGBTQ pride parade at one the country’s top public universities and detained all of the participants Friday.
Riot police entered Bogazici University and surrounded dozens of students who were waiving rainbow flags and calling for tolerance. They arrested the students one by one and led them into police buses with their hands cuffed behind them.
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The Human Rights Association has released a written statement about the death threats against the co-chair of its provincial branch in Hakkari, a Kurdish-majority province in eastern Turkey.
Turkey must release the 11 women’s right defenders detained arbitrarily, cease the judicial harassment of these women, and conduct effective investigations into their allegations of inhuman and degrading treatment during arrest, police custody and pre-trial detention.
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Our latest report Keep The Volume Up: Intimidation Policies Against Rights Defenders 2015-2021 is online!
The report provides an analysis of the administrative and judicial interventions and media defamation faced by at-risk rights defenders, whose profiles we feature on the Keep The Volume Up (Sessiz Kalma) website.
Fırat Akdeniz is a teacher dismissed on the grounds of Statutory Decree no. 672, who works as the Diyarbakır Branch director for the Human Rights Association (İHD) and is a member of the Education and Science Workers’ Union (Eğitim-Sen). He has been detained and sued countless times for participating in demonstrations and meetings for the Human Rights Association and the union of which he is a member. Akdeniz has a prison sentence of 1 year and 6 months for defying Law no.
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On January 10, 2016, 1128 academics from 89 universities held a press conference announcing that they signed “We will not be party to this crime!” petition. The statement called to end the violence exerted on people during the curfew declared in Kurdish provinces following the fighting that broke out and to start a conflict resolution process to ensure durable peace. The following week, there were 2212 signatories of the petition. Hundreds of academics were removed from their posts and lost their jobs; their passports were confiscated.
Established in 2010 after the murder of Münevver Karabulut, the We Will Stop Femicide Platform (KCDP) has been of the most active role-players of the women’s movement in Turkey for the last 12 years. They make monthly reports on femicide data, follow up on the lawsuits concerning violence against the LGBTI+ community and women, and take their outcry unrelentingly to the streets.