Reports

Turkey's human rights record is marred by its severe restrictions on the right to freedom of expression. Individuals in Turkey face prosecution and prison terms merely for using forbidden minority languages or expressing opinions on certain taboo subjects.

The report on Turkey, its fourth (including the Progress Reports that pre-dated Turkey's formal candidacy), has become an important annual measure of progress on the political elements of the Copenhagen Criteria for membership, which require "stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights, a

On December 19, 2000, thirty prisoners and two gendarmes were killed when some ten thousand armed soldiers went into twenty Turkish prisons to break up a nonviolent protest by inmates and transfer them to the newly constructed F-type prisons.

Human Rights Watch welcomes the Justice Ministry's apparent abandonment of plans to impose a regime of isolation in its new F-type high security prisons. However, the organization believes that further work on the draft laws issued last week will be necessary in order to allay fears among prisoners and their families.

At its summit in Helsinki in December 1999, the European Union (E.U.) recognized Turkey as a candidate for membership in the union, subject to the understanding that actual negotiations for membership will not commence until Turkey meets thepolitical criteria for E.U. membership established in Copenhagen in 1993.

Prisoners cannot simply be left to languish for weeks, possibly months, locked up in their cells, and this regardless of how good material conditions might be within the cells.

In the early 1990s, when the Turkish government's conflict with Kurdish separatists was at its most fierce, a right-wing organization called "Hizbullah" began attacking suspected sympathizers of the Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK). Young assassins operated in broad daylight in the mainly Kurdish cities of southeast Turkey.

On February 15, 1999, Abdullah Ocalan, leader of the Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK), was apprehended in Kenya and transported to Turkey, where he has been held ever since on the prison island of Imrali.

Denied political, and cultural rights, Kurds have been the principal victims of the Turkish state's excesses since the military coup of 1980. (It should be noted that, ironically--or tragically--the majority of victims of PKK abuses have also been Kurds.)

This report examines the state of free expression in Turkey. It focuses largely on the print and broadcast media, and to a lesser extent on freedom of speech in politics.

This report documents a pattern of torture—according to internationally recognized definitions of the term—and mistreatment of security detainees by the Anti-Terror Branch (Teror 'le Mucadele Subesi) of the Security Directorate of Turkey’s Ministry of the Interior.

Some 2,685 villages and hamlets in Turkey’s southeastern provinces have been completely or partially depopulated since fighting broke out in the region in August 1984 between government forces and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), an armed group which until recently had the avowed goal of an independent Kurdish state.

In 1954 Turkey signed the 1953 European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.

Since 1984, the government of Turkey has waged an increasingly bitter war with insurgents of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

We issued this report upon learning of a tense debate within the U.S. State and Defense Departments over whether to allow the export to Turkey of the most advanced and deadly cluster bomb in the U.S. arsenal, the CBU-87.