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Effectiveness of Board Visits

Police station visiting by civilians is new for Turkey, and a break with the traditional relationship between state security forces and the public in which supervision was strictly a one-way street. The only precedents for the visiting now being conducted by human rights boards were visits conducted by the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) from 1990 onwards, and the visits made by Dr. Sema Pişkinsüt from 1998 to 2000 when she was president of the Turkish Parliamentary Human Rights Commission. Both these mechanisms, operating at a time when torture was pandemic, discovered victims and instruments of torture. On two occasions Dr. Pişkinsüt located secret interrogation rooms, and attempted to initiate prosecutions of alleged torturers. In the current improved climate, one would not expect boards to produce a similar level of findings, but if visits are to have an impact on patterns of ill-treatment, it is essential that they are sufficiently frequent, determined and inquisitive. The general impression gained by Human Rights Watch’s research was that while supervisory visits are still very much at the experimental stage, delegates are taking their responsibilities seriously and want to make this form of monitoring work. But with little institutional experience to draw on, or obvious models elsewhere in public life on which to base their efforts, board members are going to have to be prepared to be bold, learn fast, and share experience.

Standards and Methodologies

The Human Rights Presidency has circulated to boards translations of a section of the Istanbul Protocol²⁵ concerning police station visits, but Human Rights Watch’s research suggests a diversity of approaches being taken by human rights boards, and a highly variable standard of monitoring. Several board representatives said that they wanted guidance on how to carry out visits, including a checklist of criteria, with clear advice down to the level of how much space, ventilation, or light a detainee should have, and what nutrition or hygiene arrangements are acceptable. Others are independently devising their own methodologies, such as the Izmir board, which in August established a Prison and Detention Unit Monitoring Group and developed an eight-point training program for police station monitors in collaboration with Izmir University, and the Mardin human rights board, which has developed its own seventeen-point checklist for police station visits.²⁶

Representatives of provincial human rights boards described to Human Rights Watch visits they had undertaken, and in three cases passed on copies of visit reports. Some visits were little more than a courtesy call, while others were comparatively searching. Out of the thirty-one provincial human rights boards that had conducted visits as of September 2005, sixteen had conducted unannounced as well as announced visits. Some delegations used the custody book as a valuable supervision resource. In an unannounced visit in the summer of 2005 the Malatya board, for example, interviewed three detainees and compared the detainees’ accounts of their admission with the details appearing in the custody book.²⁷ Another delegation that examined a custody book reminded the security forces that they must enter the hour, and not just the date, of detention and discharge. Examining the custody book should be standard practice—even if there are no detainees at the time of the visit, the custody book may reveal poor standards of record keeping, or a suspicious pattern in which detainees consistently decline legal assistance.

Scheduling and Targeting Visits

There are 1,570 police stations in Turkey,²⁸ and the total number of detention units including gendarmeries is probably more than twice that. Several governors told Human Rights Watch that they were each responsible for more than fifty police and gendarmerie posts. As police station monitoring is new, most boards had carried out no more than one or two visits. If the eighty-one boards are to provide effective supervision they will have to introduce a regular program of visits that, while not imposing a crushing time burden on busy board members, ensures that every unit can expect a visit with reasonable frequency.

Boards should be alert to what is happening in police stations in their provinces, and respond to developments with visits when appropriate. For example, press reports of complaints of ill-treatment are a sign that there may be a pattern of abuse in the police stations in question, and it would be quite appropriate for the board to make a visit to look at practices in that unit, not to rule on the specific incident—which is the business of the judicial system—but to examine police practices in that unit. Unfortunately, many board representatives expressed reluctance to make visits other than on the basis of a formal complaint. In July a former detainee, Cemil Bilgili, held a press conference complaining that he had been insulted and beaten at Çağlayan police station in Istanbul.²⁹ When Human Rights Watch asked the deputy governor of Istanbul whether the Istanbul human rights board was considering visiting Çağlayan police station in the light of Bilgili’s public complaint, the assistant governor stated that they could not visit since Bilgili had made no complaint to the board.³⁰

Similarly, any police unit where there is a death or serious injury in custody deserves close attention from monitoring bodies, quite aside from any judicial investigation that may be under way, but the response from boards has not been systematic. For example, Murat Yavuzer died on the night of June 1, 2005, while detained at Sağlık police station in Diyarbakır for alleged theft.³¹ The police’s account is that Murat Yavuzer made a noose of his clothing and committed suicide. As of September, Diyarbakır provincial human rights board had carried out no visits to Sağlık police station, or to any other police station or gendarmerie.

It is no coincidence that one of the very few alleged incidents of torture emerging from police stations in recent months were in Ordu province, where monitoring visits have not yet been conducted. On October 2, 2005, four juveniles aged between fifteen and seventeen, and an eighteen-year-old man, reported that police officers at Ordu police headquarters had beaten them, stripped them naked and squeezed their testicles. They also stated that police officers threatened to rape them and to photograph them naked. The juveniles were not immediately referred to the prosecutor or permitted access to a lawyer. Three of the juveniles later received medical reports consistent with their allegations. In another case in Ordu, on October 28 an adult detainee was taken from Ordu police headquarters to hospital for emergency treatment for a heart condition. He reported that he and a fellow detainee had been severely beaten by police. It is not known whether the Ordu governor was carrying out monitoring visits in accordance with the 1999 circular issued by the Prime Minister’s office, but the Ordu bar association and medical association representatives told Human Rights Watch that the provincial human rights board had conducted no police station visits.³² In February 2006 the public prosecution office in Ordu gave a decision not to prosecute police officers in connection with the allegations made by the four juveniles and adult detained on October 2, 2005.

Cooperation of the Police and Gendarmerie

It appears that law enforcement personnel in most cases cooperated well with visiting board delegations, though there were some problems. In Kahramanmaraş, board members expressed an interest in visiting a prison, but the governor insisted that they should first seek permission from the prison prosecutor.³³ In Şanlıurfa, when a human rights board delegation went to the provincial gendarmerie command in June they were bodysearched in what appeared to be a hostile manner, and the delegation decided not to proceed with the visit.³⁴ When the representative of the Denizli medical association attended Denizli prison with the chairman of the bar association and a psychiatrist in order to investigate a complaint made by a prisoner, gendarmes found a scalpel blade in his wallet, whereupon the prison prosecutor launched an investigation against the doctor on possible charge of smuggling a weapon into a prison. The investigation resulted in a decision not to prosecute, but the board did not intervene on the doctor’s behalf when he was summoned to give a statement. Disaffected by the experience, the doctor has not since attended board meetings, and told Human Rights Watch, “it made me regret that I got involved in the board in the first place.”³⁵