Torture Continues With Impunity
Justice Minister Mehmet Ali Sahin has said nearly 5,000 people submitted complaints to judicial bodies over maltreatment or torture at the hands of police and members of the gendarmerie from 2006-7….
He said 4,719 individuals in Turkey — 471 of them children — filed complaints with judicial bodies saying that they suffered “torture,” “heavy torture” and “disproportionate use of force” in 2006 and 2007. Nearly 3,900 lawsuits were filed in line with these applications, and over 9,000 civil servants stand as defendants in these cases….
Human rights groups … say the widespread use of torture continues in Turkey despite the government’s “zero tolerance” policy and sweeping changes made to the Turkish Penal Code (TCK).
Hüsnü Öndül, the chairman of the Human Rights Association (IHD) [said], “…We estimate that the number of people subjected to torture is at least three or four times larger than the figures stated by the ministry.”…
Özlem Dalkiran from the Helsinki Citizens Foundation [said that] the greatest obstacle to the elimination of torture and maltreatment crimes in Turkey is people’s perceptions of these offenses.[A] poll released in late June by WorldPublicOpinion.org [JW: see my blog entry of a few days ago for the poll charts] revealed that Turkey is one of four countries wherein a majority says it is acceptable to torture terrorists to save lives. The poll also found that Turkey has the largest minority among the countries polled that favors allowing governments to use torture in general.
Dalkiran complained of a lack of any serious sanction to deter civil servants from inflicting torture on civilians. “Civil servants who are accused of maltreating individuals are not punished or removed from office. There is no serious sanction against them. They escape without any punishment. Lawsuits filed against civil servants take long years to reach a conclusion,” she said…
General mistreatment by police short of actual torture also continues:
The Ankara Prosecutor’s Office has launched an investigation into two municipal police officers who allegedly beat up a grocer in Ankara’s Keciören district on the grounds that he sold alcoholic beverages after 11 p.m. (read article here)
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