Amnesty International has just issued a report calling on Turkey to urgently change the way it deals with Kurdish minors accused of joining pro-PKK protests. From the report:
Thousands of children in Turkey, some as young as 12, have been prosecuted under anti-terrorism legislation, solely for their alleged participation in demonstrations considered by the government to be in support of terrorism. The demonstrations are focused on issues of concern to members of the Kurdish community, and often involve clashes with the police.
The report gives the children’s first-hand accounts of being ill-treated on arrest and while being held in police custody. Despite widespread accounts of excessive use of force and other ill-treatment, no police officer has been brought to justice.
In many cases legal protections for children in pre-charge detention were not followed.
“Children accused of participation in demonstrations are detained in adult police custody in the Anti-Terror branch rather than the Children’s branch of police stations. There, they are often subjected to unofficial interrogation in the absence of lawyers or social workers. Records of these statements are often later used as evidence in the children’s prosecutions,” said Andrew Gardner, Amnesty International’s expert on Turkey.
You can read the full report here. For some more background, take a look at this Eurasianet article.
A bill designed to deal with the problem of the jailed minors is currently working its way through parliament in Ankara, although rights groups have criticized it as insufficient. More on that here.
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