Council of Europe says it will pay special attention to the human rights situation in Turkey after the demonstration in Strasbourg
Bunyamin Tekin
The Council of Europe (CoE) will pay particular attention to the human rights situation in Turkey, said Marija Pejčinović Burić, Secretary General of the Council, in response to a letter from the Platform for Peaceful Actions, a umbrella organization made up of 24 members of civil society groups who delivered the letter during a protest it organized on June 24, the platform’s coordinator told Turkish Minute.
Hundreds of activists, joined by former British Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn and European parliamentarians, gathered outside the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg on June 24 to protest against human rights abuses in Turkey and ask the ECHR and the CoE to take swift action against them.
The Peaceful Actions Platform submitted two letters to the Council of Europe, one addressed to CoE Commissioner for Human Rights Dunja Mijatović and the other to Secretary General Burić. The platform also submitted a letter to the European Court of Human Rights.
Yasemin Aydın, coordinator of the platform, responded in writing to questions from Turkish Minute and said the letters concerned widespread frustration with the inaction of the ECHR and the Council of Europe regarding the post-coup crackdown. State in Turkey.
“We have made it clear in our letters that we painfully observe that these institutions have failed to fulfill the critical duty assigned to them and entrusted to them. Simply put, they have remained silent in the face of what can only be described as an attempt to eradicate hundreds of thousands of people at the hands of an oppressive regime solely because of their affiliation with the Gülen movement,” said Aydın when asked about the contents of the letters.
The Gülen movement, inspired by the views of Turkish cleric Fethullah Gülen, is accused by the Turkish government and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of orchestrating a coup attempt in 2016 and is branded a ‘terrorist organization’ , although the movement denies any involvement in the coup attempt. or any terrorist activity.
“As Erdoğan’s regime has grown authoritarian over the past decade, it has taken the Gülen movement as its sworn enemy and mobilized all state capabilities at its disposal to completely eliminate the movement,” said Aydin.
Erdoğan has been targeting supporters of the Gülen movement since the December 17-25, 2013 corruption investigations, which implicated then-Prime Minister Erdoğan, his family members and those around him.
Dismissing the investigations as a Gülenist coup and a plot against his government, Erdoğan branded the movement a terrorist organization and began targeting its members. He intensified the repression of the movement following the abortive putsch which he accused Gülen of having orchestrated.
Following the failed coup, the Turkish government declared a state of emergency and carried out a massive purge of state institutions under the pretext of an anti-coup struggle. More than 130,000 civil servants have been summarily dismissed from their posts for alleged membership or relations with “terrorist organizations” by emergency decree laws without any judicial or parliamentary oversight.
A total of 332,467 people have been detained and 101,305 arrested in operations against Gülen supporters since the coup attempt, Turkish Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu said on June 30. .
“To this end, the regime has invented crimes such as having a bank account in a perfectly legal bank and sending children to state-approved, movement-run private schools (again on a perfectly legal basis ) and applied them retroactively. As these ridiculous “crimes” have been used to incriminate hundreds of thousands of people and imprison tens of thousands of them in total violation of fundamental human rights, the ECtHR has silently observed a total rejection of its founding philosophy” , Aydın said, and added, “The court, as it has become evident now, carries out a harmful discriminatory policy against the Gülen movement both in its findings and in its priority policy.”
“As this is still the last resort for justice, we want to be able to trust the court again,” Aydın said.
On June 24, the crowd of protesters, around 1,600 strong, marched towards the ECHR building in Strasbourg. They chanted slogans and held up banners saying: “ECHR, stop injustice in Turkey”, “Justice delayed is justice denied”, “The victims are here, where are the judges? and “ECHR, stop the purge in Turkey”.
More demos will come
Emphasizing that the responses to the Strasbourg protest encourage the Peaceful Actions Platform to continue its work, Aydın said she will hold more protests.
“On a personal level, I can simply say: I am always overwhelmed. We were initially expecting just over 800 people, over 1600 came. The whole atmosphere, the cohesion, the solidarity, the demand for justice and overall, raising our voices together for those who have been silenced by Erdoğan’s regime in Turkey and skillfully ignored by the Council of Europe, by Ms Mijatovic, by European Court of Human Rights, was intoxicating. It was one of those times when you are most certain that you are doing the right thing for people who just can’t do it themselves,” Aydın said.
“I believe that with events like the one in Strasbourg and the many other small activities that we have organized over the past two years, we are on the right track. But there is still a long way to go,” she added.
The European Court of Human Rights and the CoE are accused by victims of human rights violations in Turkey that culminated after the aborted 2016 putsch, when the government launched a crackdown on non-loyalist citizens under pretext of an anti-coup struggle, to turn a blind eye to the human rights violations committed in Turkey under the regime of President Erdoğan.