HRW reports on renewed torture in police custody, abductions in Turkey

HRW reports on renewed torture in police custody, abductions in Turkey

PanARMENIAN.Net - People in Turkey accused of links with terrorism or with the 2016 military coup attempt have been tortured in police custody, while others have been abducted, amidst growing evidence of detention abuses, Human Rights Watch said in a report released on Friday, October 13.

The 43-page report, “In Custody: Police Torture and Abductions in Turkey,” details credible evidence of 11 cases of serious abuse in detention, involving scores of individuals, all but one within the past seven months. The findings are based on interviews with lawyers and relatives, and a review of court transcripts, including allegations that police severely beat and threatened detainees, stripped them naked, and in some cases threatened them with sexual assault or sexually assaulted them. Human Rights Watch documented five cases of abductions in Ankara and Izmir between March and June 2017 that could amount to enforced disappearances – cases in which the authorities take a person into custody but deny it or refuse to provide information about the person’s whereabouts.

“As evidence mounts that torture in police custody has returned to Turkey, the government urgently needs to investigate and call a halt to it,” said Hugh Williamson, Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “Given Turkey’s dark history of enforced disappearances, the authorities need to locate the men still missing, and ensure that anyone held by state agents has regular access to a lawyer and their family knows where they are.”

Official figures show that in the past year well over 150,000 people have passed through police custody accused of terrorist offenses, membership of armed groups, or involvement in the July 2016 coup attempt. The reported cases show that the greatest risk of torture is for people who were detained for alleged association either with what the courts have labelled the Fethullahist Terrorist Organization (FETÖ), which the government holds responsible for the attempted coup, or with the armed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK/KCK).

The government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan publicly asserts zero tolerance for torture and has restored the safeguard of allowing detainees early access to lawyers, which had initially been removed under Turkey’s state of emergency. But the government has not acted to stamp out the sharp rise in abusive practices in police custody over the past year. From court records and other sources, Human Rights Watch identified several cases in which detainees reported ill-treatment to prosecutors or during court hearings, but that they did not investigate the allegations effectively.

Several lawyers told Human Rights Watch that their clients told them of torture or showed them physical evidence. But they said that many victims are afraid to complain, fearing reprisals against their family members. In one case Human Rights Watch documented, the former head of a preschool told a court at length at his trial in February that police had beaten and threatened him with sexual assault and rape to make him “confess” his involvement with “FETÖ.” Six other men on trial with him made similar assertions.

“When I visited him in prison, my husband told me what had happened to him in police custody in Kırıkkale,” his wife told Human Rights Watch. “He had lost a lot of weight and was exhausted. He cried and said he felt ashamed. ‘I am finished,’ he said. He told me he had been tortured.”

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