The new generation of F-type prisons were designed and built in order to implement the damaging regime of solitary and small group isolation required by Article 16 of the Anti-Terror Law. Prisoners are already being held in isolation at Kartal Special Type Prison in Istanbul, which seems to have been a pilot project. On October 1 the Turkish Justice Ministry issued two draft laws which are of great significance for its troubled prison system.

The first of the new laws abolishes the requirement that prisoners convicted under the Anti-Terror Law should be held in solitary or small group isolation, and permits them to leave their cells in order to participate in training, sport, and social activities. A second draft law establishes a comprehensive system of prison monitoring boards throughout Turkey with the stated aim of "ensuring direct monitoring of the management of prisons and places of detention, the participation of society in the resolution of problems and the transparent management of such institutions."

In early 2000, as the first of the new F-type prisons reached completion, prisoners, their families, and Turkish human rights organizations expressed mounting alarm that transfers were about to begin and that such transfers would be accompanied by extreme brutality. In May, a Human Rights Watch delegation met the Director of Prisons and Remand Facilities at the Justice Ministry. Its conclusions were published later that month in a report entitled Small Group Isolation in Turkish Prisons: An Avoidable Disaster (the Turkish translation of that report is published on the Human Rights Watch web site: www.hrw.org/campaigns/turkey/sgroup-tr.pdf). In July the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) visited Turkey in order to inspect the first of the F-type prisons at Sincan near Ankara and to discuss the transition from large wards to a cell-based system. The report on this visit has yet to be published.

The draft laws indicate that the Justice Ministry has now accepted two important principles: that isolating prisoners is inhuman and damaging to their health, and that Turkish society at large has a stake in how its prisons are run and supervised.

This is a very welcome new approach. Nevertheless, the draft law is not sufficiently detailed to give absolute reassurance. It contains, for example, no indication of how many hours a day prisoners can expect to be out of their cells. Out-of-cell time is also linked to as yet unspecified "treatment programs," and "treatment programs" consisting of chanting military songs and hours of gymnastics, enforced by beating, are still fresh in the collective memory from the period following the 1980 coup.

The draft law should explicitly indicate that, except in the most exceptional circumstances, all prisoners should have daily access to constructive activity and a wider social group for at least eight hours a day. Such access should not be made wholly dependent on participation in a rehabilitation program. A revised draft should also indicate that provisions for out-of-cell time also cover remand prisoners, who are omitted, perhaps inadvertently, from the current draft.

The F-type prison construction program was begun with the intention of holding prisoners in isolation, and their physical layout is therefore not ideally suited to the Justice Ministry's revised plans. Recreation, library, and workshop facilities, located on the administration floor of the prison, are very limited in capacity, and there appear to be no exercise yards other than those immediately adjoining the single or three-person cell units. Human Rights Watch hopes that those prisons already constructed will be converted to ensure that prisoners can easily be moved out of their cells for education, training, and recreation, and that plans for prisons under construction will be similarly adapted.

The law on prison monitoring boards could also be improved. An effective prison monitoring board will help to reassure prisoners that they will not be subjected surreptitiously to a regime of isolation, or ill-treated in the privacy of their cells, or deprived of necessary medical attention. Experience worldwide has shown that it is by no means an easy task to ensure that prison monitoring boards are fully independent of the state. But this draft proposes that monitoring boards should be entirely selected by local judicial commissions—comprised of Justice Ministry appointees. This may result in monitoring boards staffed by people close to the local state establishment who therefore may be reluctant to ask searching questions or prepare uncompromising reports. Involvement of the local bar or local medical associations, for example, would help to achieve a spread of allegiance within the membership of the board. Independence from local pressures and influences would be further enhanced if boards were responsible to a central authority such as a body coordinated by the state minister responsible for human rights or the Parliamentary Human Rights Commission. In addition, the boards' reports, which are unlikely to be effective while they remain internal, would better serve the public interest mentioned in the draft law if they were made publicly available. The draft also requires that potential candidates for membership of a monitoring board should "conform to the general conditions of the State Civil Servants' Law". It is not made clear how this condition would be applied in practice, but the State Civil Servants' Law imposes many requirements, including a duty to "protect the interests of the State under all circumstances," which potentially conflicts with an effective monitoring role.

The humane language and talk of openness contained in the commentary on these laws is in stark contrast to the state's continuing suppression of criticism of the F-type project, and also with recent bloody and fatal events inside the prisons. Three prisoners were beaten to death when security forces entered Buca Prison in Izmir in September 1995, and four prisoners died of beatings at Ümraniye Prison in Istanbul in January 1996. Ten prisoners were beaten to death during an incursion into Diyarbakir Prison in September 1996. Ten prisoners were killed at Ankara Ulucanlar Closed Prison in September 1999. In most cases, security forces attacked prisoners because they were refusing to attend roll-call or occupying parts of prison buildings after being informed of an imminent transfer to what they feared would be an isolation regime.

Moreover, Turkey has not had a full and open debate on the future of its prison system. Over the past year, whenever Turkish human rights organizations and relatives of prisoners have attempted to voice their fears publicly in peaceful demonstrations or press statements, they have been forcefully dispersed, beaten, sprayed with pepper gas, or detained. On July 27, the lawyer Eren Keskin, president of the Istanbul branch of the Human Rights Association, was injured by police when she attempted to read a press statement about F-type prisons outside the branch headquarters. On July 30, members of the organization of prisoners' relatives TAYAD (Solidarity Association of Prisoners' Families), who were making their way by bus to a demonstration in Ankara against F-type prisons, were taken by police from the bus at Sakarya, beaten, and detained at Sakarya gendarmerie headquarters. One of them, Egemen Kuscu, told Human Rights Watch that he was cut on his right eye and bruised over his face, legs, arms, and chest. He and twenty-eight others documented their injuries with photographs and medical reports and on August 3 submitted a formal complaint to the court in Sultanahmet about the ill-treatment. As they emerged from the courthouse, they were again beaten by police, detained, hosed with cold water, and charged with conducting an illegal demonstration.

Similarly, individuals collecting signatures against isolation measures planned for F-type prisons have been detained, and a signature campaign organized by the Human Rights Association was not only banned by the emergency region governor, but triggered closure for several months of the association's Diyarbakir and Van branches.

These groups and individuals were attempting to alert public opinion to abuses that the Justice Ministry, after a sharp change of direction, has now explicitly acknowledged. The Turkish government must stop trying to gag those who express opinions on the prison system and should instead work to bring these groups into the process of improving the drafts that are now on the table. A comprehensive review of the drafts must involve consultation with domestic professional and human rights organizations, academics, international governmental organizations working on prison conditions, and prisoners' family groups. The provision in the draft law which restores the right of open visits to prisoners held under the Anti-Terror Law is an important step toward creating an atmosphere of trust and goodwill. A further step would be to lift the isolation currently imposed at Kartal Special Type Prison, transforming this institution from an isolation test-bed to a prototype of a more humane system of management.