Human Rights Watch expressed profound dismay at the death of prison hunger-striker Cengiz Soydas yesterday morning.Soydas's death comes on the 150th day of a death fast staged by four hundred prisoners in Turkey's newly opened F-type prisons.
Soydas's death comes on the 150th day of a death fast staged by four hundred prisoners in Turkey's newly opened F-type prisons. The prisoners are protesting the imposition of a regime of small group isolation in the new prisons.
"This was an avoidable crisis and an avoidable fatality," said Holly Cartner, executive director of the Europe and Central Asia Division of Human Rights Watch. "For eighteen months we have been pressing the Turkish government to abandon the isolation regime in the new prisons."
On December 19, 2000, the Turkish security forces carried out a violent military operation to transfer more than a thousand prisoners from traditional wards holding sixty or more prisoners to the new F-type high security prisons based on single-person or three-person units. Prisoners resisted the transfer, at least in part because they feared that an isolation regime would be imposed on them, and would make them more vulnerable to ill-treatment. Twenty-eight prisoners and two gendarmes were killed in the operation and many injured. Gendarmes beat, tortured, and sexually assaulted prisoners during the transfer. Since that date, prisoners have been locked down in a monotonous physical environment, where they are limited to contact with their two cellmates.
Solitary and small group isolation is physically and mentally damaging and may amount to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. Impaired vision and hearing, hallucinations, tinnitus, lowering of the immune system, amenorrhea, premature menopause, depression, anxiety and aggressive behavior are among the effects documented in studies on prisoners, volunteers and animals.
In May 2000, Human Rights Watch delegates visited the Turkish Justice Ministry, asking that a humane regime be established for the F-type prisons before they were opened.
The Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT), part of the Council of Europe, of which Turkey is a member, visited the F-type prisons in January. It has repeatedly pressed the Turkish government to ensure that the new cell-based regime is accompanied by a program of out-of-cell activities, and monitoring mechanisms to ensure that prisoners are not subjected to ill-treatment in the privacy of their cells.
The Justice Ministry has suggested that it might comply with the CPT's recommendations, but has taken no steps to do so. "Once the brutal transfers had been accomplished," said Cartner, "the Turkish government remained deaf to all appeals to bring the F-type prisons in line with international standards." Human Rights Watch again called on the Turkish government to ensure that prisoners are permitted to leave their units daily for out-of-cell activities and association with other prisoners, and to permit broad access to the prisons by bar associations and the Turkish Medical Association as a safeguard against ill-treatment. The organization also calls on the Council of Europe to use its authority to press for compliance with the CPT's recommendations.
Twenty-nine year old Cengiz Soydas was a university student, detained in 1995 and sentenced to fifteen years' imprisonment for membership in a violent left-wing organization. He had been transferred on December 19, 1999 from Bartin Prison to Sincan F-type Prison, near Ankara.
