10 december is Human Rights Day and we hade a demonstration both in Oslo and Stavanger. The program was all about being a voice of people who is exposed to Human Rights violations in Turkey and in other parts of world.
DIGNITY, FREEDOM, AND JUSTICE ARE ABSENT IN TODAY´S TURKEY
As we mark the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we take this
opportunity to highlight the importance of this historic document.
The Declaration serves as a reference point to fundamental rights and freedoms, allowing to measure
improvements as well as backslides. It also provides a basis on which new human rights standards can
be built.
We celebrate the progress that has been made on the centrality of human rights becoming a global topic
of conversation, the growing awareness for women’s rights and gender equality, and the development
of new legal principles such as the universal jurisdiction to combat impunity.
However, these achievements remain overshadowed by declines in many places around the world.
Human Rights is being violated continuously in other parts of world, like in Ukraine, Syria, China.
People is being tortured, exposed to enforced migration and other types of unhuman manners.
War-torn areas continue to be prone to extreme human rights violations. In addition to the countries
ravaged by internal conflicts over the last several years, this year saw Ukraine as the scene of an
unprovoked act of aggression and horrific war crimes.
The rise of authoritarianism threatens press freedom and erodes rule of law in democratic countries and
established one-man regimes continue to stifle fundamental rights.
Turkey remains an unfortunate blind spot in the global evolution of human rights as the one-man rule
in the country keeps tightening its control over civil society by brutally suppressing peaceful protests,
and increasingly censoring and criminalizing social media commentary.
The government continues to exercise a political control over the judiciary, which in turn wields the
country’s vague anti-terrorism legislation as a weapon against dissenting groups, most notably the faithbased Gülen movement and pro-Kurdish political networks. The systematic detention of thousands of
people on the sole basis of their real or perceived affiliation with these groups which, according to one
UN opinion released in October 2020 could amount to crimes against humanity, continues at full pace.
Reports alleging mistreatment of political prisoners in police custody and in prisons keeps pouring in
from all over the country.
As part of their campaign to intimidate human rights defenders into silence, in October 2022 Turkish
authorities arrested prominent rights advocate Şebnem Korur Fincancı, who now faces absurd charges
of spreading terrorist propaganda, simply for publicly demanding an investigation into allegations that
the Turkish military used chemical weapons in northern Iraq.
Even opponents living in Europe are not completely shielded from this repression. A prominent progovernment Turkish daily news has recently published home addresses of several exiled journalists in
Germany and Sweden, exposing them to potential physical harm. The Turkish president has explicitly
demanded the extradition of dissident journalist Bülent Keneş as a precondition for greenlighting
Sweden’s NATO membership. This blatant abuse seems to meet with an indulgent silence on the part
of NATO, an alliance supposedly built around democratic values.
The UN has designated as this year’s Human Rights Day slogan “Dignity, Freedom and Justice for All,”
all of which are absent in today’s Turkey. We, as the Peaceful Actions Platform, reiterate our solid
commitment to stand up for human rights.
