Günal Kurşun is an Executive Board Member of the Human Rights Agenda Association.
Zana Aksu is the former president of the IHD (Human Rights Association) branch in Siirt, a town in Southeast Turkey. He is also editor-in-chief of a local news website called Siirt’ten Öte, which was closed down by the government. He is known for drawing attention to the mass graves after periods of conflict, as well as reporting on the many human rights violations in the Siirt region.
Aksu is a conscientious objector to military service. He has been detained many times and has been levied administrative fines and a suspended sentence.
Gökalp, former Member of the Turkish Medical Association Central Council, is a physician and a human rights advocate. He has worked in Diyarbakır Medical Assocation’s commissions on human rights, workers’ health and occupational diseases. He worked as a volunteer physician at Human Rights Association in Turkey to document torture cases.
Ms. Füsun Üstel is a well-known professor in the field of political science. She used to be a faculty member of the Department of Political Science at Galatasaray University, a reputable institution, in which she also served as the Chair. Apart from her academic studies, she has a long history in civil society organizations, including the Citizens Assembly and History Foundation.
BIANET The court of appeals has upheld the prison sentences in the trial over daily Özgür Gündem, which was closed by a Statutory Decree. At the final hearing of the trial on February 15, 2021, Özgür Gündem newspaper's grant holder Kemal Sancılı, managing editor İnan Kızılkaya, editor-in-chief Zana Kaya and Eren Keskin were sentenced to 20 years, 10 months in prison in total on "terrorism" charges.
Paris-Geneva-Ankara, March 30, 2022 – In the early hours of March 16, 2022, police raided the homes of 24 women’s rights defenders and activists in Diyarbakır, and arbitrarily detained them. On March 18, 2022, 11 of them were arrested. The Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders (FIDH-OMCT), Human Rights Association (İnsan Hakları Derneği-İHD), and Human Rights Foundation of Turkey (HRFT, Türkiye İnsan Hakları Vakfı-TİHV) condemn this new attack against women’s rights defenders in Turkey and call on the authorities to immediately and unconditionally release them.
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A Turkish court ruled on Monday that philanthropist Osman Kavala should stay in prison for at least another month as lawyers prepare their final statements in a trial which has caused tensions between Ankara and its Western allies.
Opposition and rights activists have said the trial is politically motivated and part of a crackdown on dissent under President Tayyip Erdogan. The government rejects this and says Turkey's courts are independent.
Ahead of the fifth, and possibly final, hearing in the trial of human rights defender Osman Kavala and seven other defendants on 21 March, Amnesty International is calling for their acquittal and Kavala’s immediate release.
Çağdaş Hukukçular Derneği (Progressive Lawyers’ Association), ÇHD for short, has become a symbol of the fight against unlawfulness and violations of the right to defend suffered by lawyers in Turkey. The association is the primary defender for crucial legal cases such as the Soma mine disaster and the Nuriye Gülmen - Semih Özakça case - two academics who lost their jobs with a statutory decree signed by the president. There are currently prison sentences given to 18 ÇHD-member lawyers.
On 2 February 2021, Twitter took the still relatively unusual step of flagging a politician’s tweets for “hateful conduct”, the same thing it did to tweets from former US president Donald Trump before his ban.