Human Rights Watch called on the Turkish government to
guarantee that its new prisons will meet international standards.
Turkey's plans to introduce a new generation of high-security prisons have drawn increasing criticism abroad and controversy at home. More than two hundred prisoners are on a hunger strike in protest over the new facilities and some prisoners have reached the forty-ninth day of a "death fast."
The new "F-Type" prisons will house up to three prisoners per cell, moving away from the current use of wards holding up to sixty or more people. Human Rights Watch does not oppose the cell system, but the group cautions that unless accompanied by a program of out-of-cell activities, the new prisons may amount to an isolation regime that violates international standards. Prisoners also fear that segregation in the smaller units will subject them to greater risk of torture and abuse.
Twenty-eight prisoners have been killed by Turkish prison staff and security forces in the past five years. Human Rights Watch has urged the Turkish government to address prisoners' concerns by announcing plans for running the facilities in accordance with international standards, guaranteed by independent outside monitoring by representatives of local bar associations, medical associations, and human rights organizations.
The CPT report released yesterday expressed "no objection in principle to this move towards smaller living units, always provided that inmates have the opportunity to spend a reasonable part of each day outside their living units, engaged in purposeful activities." The CPT did not address the prisoners' additional fears that they are more likely to be subjected to ill-treatment in the privacy of a cell. It did however urge the Turkish government to publish a 1996 CPT report that discusses the new prisons, "in order to stimulate public debate on this important issue."
Human Rights Watch called the Turkish government response to the CPT report "evasive and defensive," and said it missed an important opportunity to resolve doubts and fears about the new prisons. Moreover, the authorities' response included the extraordinary claim that prisoners held in small group isolation at Kartal Special Type Prison-a prototype for the new F-type prisons-remain in their cells twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, because they refuse to participate in any activities. According to former Kartal prisoners and lawyers of current prisoners interviewed by Human Rights Watch, prisoners at the facility are never offered an opportunity to engage in activities out of their cells. "To resort to falsehoods in the middle of the current crisis, when there is a need for trust above all, is inexcusable," said Jonathan Sugden, Turkey researcher for Human Rights Watch.
There are some signs that the Justice Ministry may have changed its plans for the new facilities, but it continues to send ambiguous signals. Ministry officials have recently begun to admit that solitary or small group isolation causes physical and psychological damage, but they continue to employ an extreme form of isolation at the Kartal facility. The Ministry published a draft law to eliminate the legal basis for isolation in the new facilities, but the draft has not been enacted. The Ministry has also proposed a draft law to establish local prison visiting boards, but the plan is flawed because the selection procedures for the boards do not provide for sufficient independence.
On December 5, Justice Minister Hikmet Sami Turk made a public statement giving "the most open undertaking" that prisoners would not be transferred to the new prisons until legal safeguards were in place, but this is in striking contrast to the Ministry's refusal, for nearly a decade, to give any information about how the new prisons were to be run. Unfortunately, the Justice Ministry commands little trust with prisoners or prisoners' families, who have long experience of medical neglect and recent memories of prison massacres. For examples, gendarmes beat and tortured ten prisoners to death in the Ulucanlar Prison in Ankara in 1999-only hours after officials had given assurance that no aggressive intervention would be taken against prisoners who had overtaken a wing of the prison.
Human Rights Watch has no position on the current hunger strike, which may be motivated by political demands and interests that are extraneous to the issue of the F-type prisons. On the other hand, the rights group opposes the Ministry's apparent initial plans to isolate prisoners in violation of their rights, Sugden said. He called on the Ministry to make its position clear.
"If the Ministry has now changed direction, the public needs to understand that," said Sugden. "And if there is a chance that straightforward efforts at clarification can prevent a repeat of the 1996 hunger strike, in which twelve prisoners died, the Justice Ministry has a duty to walk an extra mile in order to achieve a resolution."
