VI. Police Violence in the Context of Identity Checks

The practice of police conducting identity checks, asking people to produce ID on demand and checking it against information held in a central data bank (the General Information Bank-Genel Bilgi Toplama, GBT) is not a new one in Turkey. However, the practice was given a legal basis for the first time in the June 2007 revised law on the powers and duties of the police (detailed above in Chapter III). For the first time it was provided for by law that the police "can exercise the authority to stop [an individual] provided that there are reasonable grounds based on the experience of the police officer and the impression he gets from the prevailing circumstances." It is also stated immediately afterward that this power cannot be used "on a continuous basis in an arbitrary fashion." [118]   The law states that the person stopped will be informed by the police officer of the reason for being stopped and the police officer will demonstrate that he is a police officer by showing his own police ID before requesting the ID of the individual who has been stopped.

Numerous individuals have reported that they have been physically assaulted and/or threatened in the course of police officers carrying out these ID checks. [119] Often, it appears, it was when an individual asked to see an officers' police ID , that the officer would resort to violence or threats of violence.  Complaints lodged against the police often result in retaliation in the form of counter-charges of violently resisting or obstructing the police ( the issue of counter-charges regularly brought by police against those who allege they have been mistreated will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter VII, below).

Among the cases of police violence arising from ID checks reported to Human Rights Watch are the following:

Case of Feyzullah Ete

Feyzullah Ete, age 26, died after being kicked in the chest by a plainclothes police officer in the context of a routine ID check by police in the Avcılar area of Istanbul on November 21, 2007. A medical report from a special department of the Forensic Medical Institute did not document conclusively the cause of death and in May 2008 the lawyer representing Ete's family commissioned a further expert report from Istanbul University's Forensic Medical Department, which recorded "commotio cordis" (cardiac arrest as a result of sudden impact to the precordial region) as the cause of death. [120]

Feyzullah Ete, a worker in a clothes factory and the main breadwinner for his parents, wife, and two little girls, had been about to go watch a Turkey-Bosnia football match at a local café when his encounter with the police occurred. At around 8:30 p.m. he and Ali Oturakçı, a friend of many years, were sitting in a park in the neighborhood where they both lived, when four police officers approached them. During a meeting with Ete's family and Ali Oturakçı, including a visit to the area where the incident occurred, Ali Oturakçı described to a Human Rights Watch researcher how the police, identifiable by their walkie-talkies, had entered the small open area with children's swings and some picnic tables and benches, overlooked by flats, and approached the two to demand their ID.

Feyzullah told them, "But we live here, we're from this neighbourhood." They punched me in the face and then one officer who stood on a slightly raised area over there aimed a kick directly at Feyzullah's chest on his left side. He fell back and I tried hard to revive him. We got him into the car but I realized that by the time we were on the way to the hospital he had no pulse. The whole thing happened in a matter of minutes. [121]

Ali Mutlu, the police officer who reportedly kicked Ete, was released after giving a statement to the prosecutor. He was later arrested and remanded to prison pending trial, charged with "intentional injury resulting in death" (article 87/4, Turkish Penal Code). [122]

The Istanbul Security Directorate issued a statement which appeared the day after the incident, and claims that the police responded to a complaint that Ete and his companion were causing a public disturbance, drinking alcohol and being rowdy.  It claims that the police went to warn them and to check their IDs, and were then attacked by the two. Ete is said to have fallen to the ground and was unable to get up, and the cause of his death not known. [123] This statement remains on their website and has not been updated to take account of the fact that a police officer is on trial for killing Feyzullah Ete.

At the first hearing of the trial of the police officer on June 24, 2008, the court took the decision to hold the trial in closed hearing. Only two family members of the deceased were allowed to be present, Ete's mother and older brother. [124] The family of the defendant were also not admitted, and nor were members of the press, or a representative from Human Rights Watch. The court cited a provision in the Criminal Procedure Code (article 182/2) allowing for closed hearings in cases where there were "public security" considerations-there was no explanation of what the particular public security risk was in this case.

In order to heighten the public perception that members of the security forces and public officials will be held accountable for abuses committed in the course of their professional duties and to increase confidence in the justice system and government that serious efforts are being made to tackle such abuses, it is imperative that courts demonstrate their impartiality and do not seem to be protecting members of the security forces. Human rights violations committed by members of the security forces and public officials are clearly a matter of great public interest and there should be compelling reasons to restrict information about such cases.

In the Feyzullah Ete murder trial, Ali Oturakçı is the main witness testifying against the police. However he also faces trial in the same courtroom for "violently resisting the police" (article 265/1), thus appearing in the trial as both an injured party and a suspect. A second closed hearing of the case involving the main defendant Ali Mutlu and Ali Oturakçı was held on 16 September, 2008 and a third on November 6, at which Mutlu was granted bail. Following the hearing, Adil Ete, the elder brother of the deceased Feyzullah Ete, was detained when he reacted angrily to the news of Mutlu being bailed and reportedly threw a cigarette lighter at the court door. Human Rights Watch was informed that Adil Ete was remanded to prison to await trial on charges that are likely to be insulting the court, and forcibly resisting a public official (articles 125 and 265, Turkish Penal Code). Given the relatively low level nature of the disturbance and that there is no suggestion that Adil Ete is a flight risk, or would interfere with any evidence or witnesses, the decision to place him in pre-trial detention, which could last several months, would appear to be harsh and unnecessary. [125]

Case of Sinan Tekpetek

Sinan Tekpetek's ID was checked as he was returning home from his brother's wedding party at around 11:15 p.m. on July 26, 2007. He was stopped in Taksim, Istanbul, and his ID was checked by police and his details relayed by telephone to a police station. His ID was given back and he walked on down a quiet road leading to a bus (dolmu ş ) stop. Tekpetek (aged in his mid 20s) was approached by a police car from behind and forcibly bundled into it. He recounted to Human Rights Watch what happened next:

Pepper gas was immediately sprayed into my face. My head was pushed down so I couldn't work out where I was being taken to but it seemed like we drove for about 15 minutes to a place around the city walls. We arrived at an empty lot and I was taken out and beaten and beaten with other police officers who arrived in two more police cars joining in. [126]

Tekpetek claims that his ordeal ended when he was thrown from the moving car, dumped in the Karaköy area of the city. He later secured a medical report from the Siyami Ersek hospital in Kadıköy, which identified two broken ribs and bruising and cuts to his face and body. He was certified as unfit to work for 20 days. Photographs of Tekpetek taken after the incident show severe bruising to his body including double-lined bruising on his back, consistent with being beaten with a truncheon.

Tekpetek works on an anarchist publication called %52 Öfke! He is also a defendant in a trial that began some years earlier arising from an incident when he and a friend attempted to intervene to help someone whom they say was being beaten by the police; Tekpetek was charged in that incident with violently resisting a police officer. The case continues but, to Tekpetek's mind, raises the possibility that he was deliberately targeted because he was known to one of the police officers. However, he reports that while being beaten, he was not directly verbally threatened other than being sworn at.

Abductions by officials, which can include inhuman treatment and torture have been reported in Turkey for many years. This was the only case reported to Human Rights Watch in 2007 which occurred in Istanbul, though the Diyarbakır branch of the Human Rights Association reported to Human Rights Watch that they continued to receive allegations of this practice persisting in Diyarbakır. [127] The investigation of such allegations proves highly problematic because it is generally very difficult for victims to identify perpetrators or to discover witnesses able or willing to testify that an "abduction" occurred.

The investigation of such incidents should involve a concerted effort to examine all CCTV footage available from the location where an incident is alleged to have occurred, and for the police themselves to make available records of all personnel on duty at the relevant time and their whereabouts. Strengthening chain of command control and more detailed supervision of police teams' activities and whereabouts are also urgently needed in order to safeguard against the risk that such gross abuse of authority can occur.

Case of Muammer Öz

Muammer Öz, his brother, sister-in-law, her brother and cousin, were sitting on the grass verge on the Moda seafront, in the Kadıköy district of Istanbul, on the afternoon of July 29, 2007, when they were approached by two uniformed police officers. Muammer Öz, age 27, recounted,

One of them said to my brother, "You look like someone, show me your ID." At that moment my phone rang. The police officer became very angry and shouted, "How dare you talk on the phone in front of me when I am addressing you." I answered that there was no grounds for showing our IDs in a public place in this way when we were sitting together as a family, and told him I was a lawyer. At that, he grabbed my collar and started to push at me. We showed our IDs but the other police officer joined in and they punched me. One sprayed pepper gas right into my face. Then other police officers arrived. [128]

A photograph of the incident taken by someone who happened to witness the scene shows a police officer beating Öz with a long wooden truncheon and his headscarved sister-in-law hopelessly attempting to prevent it. [129]

Muammer Öz was then taken to the police station in the police car of the first two officers, handcuffed and continuously beaten and threatened on the way to the station. Öz's relatives were brought to the station in another car. He told us,

As they beat me, one of them said, "We've been in the police for 15 years. Nothing will happen to us. We've done over a lot of lawyers like you and we'll do you over too." [130]

Öz later obtained a medical report from the Forensic Medical Institute, which recorded bruising and cuts to his body and that his nose was broken, for which he later required surgery.

Two police officers are now facing prosecution for excessive use of force, defamation, and intentional injury of Muammer Öz. [131] Neither officer attended their first trial hearing, which took place on June 26, 2008, eleven months after the original incident. Their trial was postponed till December 25, 2008. However, Muammer Öz will by then have faced at least three trial hearings as defendant in a case brought against him by the police. After the July 2007 incident he found himself promptly charged with "using violence to prevent public officials from performing their duty" (article 265/1, Turkish Penal Code), an offense carrying  a prison sentence of between six months and three years. As in the case of Feyzullah Ete discussed earlier, the Istanbul police directorate rapidly put out a statement about the July 29, 2007 incident, describing how Öz had violently resisted the police ID check, had claimed that the police did not have the authority, had attacked the police officers who had sustained injuries as a result, and had been injured himself through falling as he tried to escape. [132] The police's statement to the press asserted that Öz "was not beaten, and that the officers were faced with resistance as they performed their duty and for this reason progressively increasing force was used." [133]

Allegations centering on police stations in Beyo ğ lu, Istanbul

The Beyo ğ lu district of Istanbul-off Tarlaba ş ı Boulevard near Taksim Square-is perhaps the most centrally located area of the city that is predominantly poor, inhabited by a mixed population including Kurdish migrants from the southeast of Turkey who were forcibly displaced when their villages were evacuated in the early 1990s, a long-standing local Roma population, and more recently asylum seekers from various countries. The area borders the main commercial shopping and entertainment district of Beyo ğ lu, and unsurprisingly is associated too with prostitution and drug dealing. Human rights groups and lawyers have recorded a high number of allegations of police violence occurring in the Beyo ğ lu area in the past year, and the particular focus of complaint s has been on the police force working from two police stations. [134]

Case of Mehmet Nezir Çirik

Mehmet Nezir Çirik, age 30, sustained severe internal bleeding from a ruptured spleen that he alleges was the result of injuries sustained when he and a friend, Arif Kılınç, were beaten by police after being stopped for a routine ID check/stop and search, including in a police car while handcuffed, and then when detained at a police station.

On leaving the home of Çirik's father in the Beyo ğ lu area at about 10:30 p.m. on August 10, 2007, Çirik and Kılınç met a group of plainclothes police officers who demanded their IDs. Çirik told Human Rights Watch,

Immediately on seeing our places of birth [Çirik is from Mardin, Kılınç from Diyarbakır, both areas of Turkey, with a predominantly Kurdish population], they searched us. When we asked them what the problem was, the answer was "Shut up" and a punch. Arif was getting very edgy and I tried to calm him but he kept asking what this was about. They beat him heavily … We were put in the car, handcuffed, and taken to hospital. We were led in by the police who remained with us; a doctor asked us if there was any problem. We said "no" and were then taken to the station.  At the station I tried to explain to them that Arif's mental state wasn't good and that he had had therapy. Arif kept asking for a cigarette and I told them to give him one as it would settle his nerves. With Arif continually asking for a cigarette and me refusing to sign the police record of the incident which totally wrongly stated that we had disobeyed them and had resisted having our IDs checked, two or three officers suddenly just attacked us. They beat me with a truncheon, punched me and kicked me and I fell to the ground. Then it seemed like all of the police joined in. Pepper gas was also sprayed into my face. [135]

Kılınç's wife and brother-in-law arrived at the station to find them, and the brother-in-law alleges, according to Çirik, that at that point he was also beaten by the police. All of them were then taken in a police minibus and ordered to get out at a quiet spot by the side of the road near the Bilgi University Dolapdere campus. Soon afterwards Çirik began to feel severe internal pain, "as if something had broken inside me." [136] They went to hospital , where Çirik lay down on a bench in agony. While waiting, a police officer on the door of the hospital asked what was wrong with them. Çirik stated that they had been violently attacked at the police station. Some time afterwards police from the station arrived, spoke to the doctor, and Çirik and his companions were then told to leave the hospital immediately. Çirik and Kılınç went on to a private clinic hospital were Çirik's condition was immediately identified as serious and he was referred to the Vatan Hospital and then on to Istanbul University Hospital (Çapa), where he underwent surgery to remove his ruptured spleen . [137]

A statement by the Istanbul Security Directorate one week after the incident straightforwardly refuted a press report that Cirik had undergone surgery and had his spleen removed as a result of being beaten, and stated that an investigation into the incident had revealed that the two men were found to be carrying knives, that they had violently resisted the police, and that their routine medical reports from Taksim İ lk Yardım Hospital (taken prior to detention at the station) showed they had no signs of injuries. On December 11, 2007, Çirik and Kılınç were formally indicted for "using violence or threats against a public official to prevent them from carrying out a duty" (article 265/1, Turkish Penal Code) . The indictment states that they were stopped because the police suspected them, knives were discovered on their persons, and they attempted to escape and resisted being put in the police vehicle. [138] No mention is made of the fact that Çirik was subsequently hospitalized as a result of his injuries. It would seem that the prosecutor was willing to take at face value the police's version of the incident. [139] Meanwhile, some fourteen months after the incident, the prosecutor's investigation into Çirik and Kılınç's complaint of torture-resulting in life-threatening internal injury to Çirik-is not yet complete. [140]

Mehmet Nezir Çirik has now returned to his former job as a private chauffeur. He reflected on the situation:

In my neighbourhood most people wouldn't bother to complain of being beaten up by the police, if they even knew who to complain to. After all, they'd just assume it would go nowhere and the consequences would be worse for them or turn against them. In any case some people can't read or write and many don't know their rights. [141]

Case of Esmeray

In the course of a police identity check on May 25, 2008 on people in a street off the main İ stiklal Street in Beyo ğ lu, Esmeray (aged 34), a transgender member of the NGO Lambda Istanbul, was stopped and a police officer demanded to see her ID. Esmeray, who works as a street seller selling stuffed mussels (midye dolması) a nd is also a performance artist regularly performing at a local venue her own show based on her life story, reported to Human Rights Watch that she had complied with this request:

I told them that I lived right there [Esmeray lives in the street where this happened] and that they had to be acting on clear suspicion that they were preventing a crime to justify doing this. What was that suspicion? The police officer then demanded to search my handbag and I said I'd only accept such a search by a woman police officer. At that the police officer seized me, grabbed my bag and emptied its contents into the street. Everything was strewn everywhere. I told them this was against the law, and at that together with some traffic police they came at me and pushed me. One traffic police officer kicked me in the shin. I told them I'd file a complaint. "Complaint to who you want! We have all the powers!" they said. It could have been a lot worse if I hadn't told them I'd go to the media, that I knew my rights, that I'd been beaten by the police before and that that time one of them had even apologised to me afterwards. [142]

Esmeray alleged that she was severely beaten and kicked by police officers on June 6, 2007 when she walked past a police station on her way home. She filed a complaint with the public prosecutor, as she has done again after the latest incident, and over a year later in July, 2008 learnt that two police officers will be tried for injuring and insulting her, and for misconduct. The first trial hearing will take place on March, 2008. [143]

A May 2008 Human Rights Watch report on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights in Turkey, "We Need a Law for Liberation," [144] features Esmeray's other experiences of police harassment and violence. That report also describes how, after the passing of the revised police law in June 2007 Lambda Istanbul documented raids on gay bars in Beyo ğ lu in which individuals expelled from such bars were beaten with truncheons and had pepper gas sprayed in their faces. [145]

Lambda Istanbul twice in 2007 (in April and again in December) submitted a file of complaints to the Istanbul Provincial Human Rights Board, [146] including complaints received from transgender people about police harassment including ill-treatment, some occurring in the course of police ID checks. In answer to the April submission the then deputy governor wrote to inform Lambda Istanbul that information had been sought from the Provincial Security Directorate, the Ş i ş li and Beyo ğ lu district governor's offices ( kaymakam ), and it had been reported back that "in records and in the districts the allegations and complaints mentioned in connection with incidents had not been encountered." [147]