The Turkish judiciary, which was meticulously designed by Erdogan through a number of legislations and of course dismissal of thousands of judges in the wake of the failed coup of July 2016, is clearly unwilling to offer a remedy to victims of torture for the pain they have endured.
There were 314,502 inmates in Turkish prisons as of March 31, meaning that Turkey has the sixth largest prison population in the world, following the US, China, Brazil, India and the Russian Federation.
As a last-ditch attempt to defraud victims of their dignity, parole boards force political prisoners to confess their being “terrorists” and implicate others.
Statistics highlight that Turkish public prosecutors have filed more than 450,000 charges under Article 314 of the Turkish Penal Code within the last nine-years. What is worse, between 2016 and 2021 more than 310,000 individuals have been sentenced for membership of an armed terrorist organisation.
The EU and member states are consolidating the practice of pushbacks to prevent unauthorised entrants from crossing their borders and/or submitting asylum applications.
Fethi Un, Murat Korkmaz and Metin Yucel were nothing but lawyers. They were unlawfully identified with their clients and targeted. They were arrested and whilst in detention treated -in late Fethi Un’s own words- “worse than an animal” and their lives were stolen. Let us hope that no other prisoner shares the same fate.