HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH CHILDREN’S RIGHTS DIVISION

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TURKEY

Torture and Ill-Treatment of Children in Turkish Police Stations

A Report Prepared for the Committee on the Rights of the Child by Human Rights Watch

November 1, 2000

Turkish society values its children highly. It is, therefore, extraordinary that successive Turkish governments have comprehensively failed to protect children and juveniles in police custody. During the 1990s Human Rights Watch reported many cases of torture and ill-treatment of children by police and gendarmes, sometimes to the point of death.[1] Torture in Turkey has been described as “systematic” by the United Nations Committee against Torture,[2] and “widespread” by the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture.[3] Investigations conducted by the Turkish Parliamentary Human Rights Commission have shown that today the practice persists apparently undiminished.

On emerging from detention, children as young as twelve have reported being subjected to electric shocks, hosing with pressurized cold water, beatings with a truncheon, and falaka (beating the soles of the feet). Police officers have also tortured children sexually, including stripping them naked and sexually assaulting them. Medical evidence has corroborated the children’s allegations in many cases.

Torture is not a secret in Turkey: the Turkish press has frequently reported accounts of torture and ill-treatment by police, and the Turkish Criminal Code provides heavy penalties for these acts: Article 243 provides for one to eight years' imprisonment and permanent or dismissal from service for security officers who “subject others to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.” Article 245 imposes up to five years' imprisonment for security officers who “ill treat or physically harm others.” Article 450/3 provides for the death penalty for any person who intentionally tortures another person to death, and Article 452 provides for fifteen years’ imprisonment for unintentional killing by wounding or beating. But one Turkish government after another has denied the extent of the problem and has neglected to enact the measures necessary to end it. The present government’s record in protecting children from torture has been lackluster. Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit issued a circular in June 1999 urging police and gendarmes not to commit torture, but the government has so far neglected to back up this solicitation with the safeguards and supervision necessary to make it effective—notably the long overdue abolition of incommunicado detention (see below). Even when police officers or gendarmes have been prosecuted, convictions have been rare, and appropriate sentencing almost unknown. A typical case is that of two officers at an Izmir police station who, in 1995, beat and kicked twelve year old Halil Ibrahim Okkali until he was hospitalized. The accused officers continued on active duty, handling prisoners and even being promoted while court proceedings dragged on. In March 1998 they were each given a ten month suspended prison sentence.

The case against those accused of torturing children in the town of Manisa, near Izmir in western Turkey, has still not reached a conclusion. The Turkish public was appalled to learn that, in a December 1995 operation, police attached to the Anti-Terror Branch of Police Headquarters Manisa detained and tortured sixteen young people—eight of them under the age of eighteen. The sixteen were held in some cases for eleven days, interrogated about supposed links with the illegal armed organization Dev-Sol (DHKP/C), and, by all apparent indications, tortured:

·  M.G., who at fourteen years of age was the youngest of the detainees, reported that during nine days' incommunicado detention, police beat and kicked him, twisted his testicles, hosed him with cold water which they told him was acid, and obliged him to watch a naked relative being tortured.

·  S.T., seventeen years of age, was stripped naked and given electric shocks to her sexual organs and toes. She was later transferred to a local hospital with vaginal bleeding.

·  M.A., sixteen years of age, was beaten, sexually assaulted, and subjected to electric shocks. She was admitted to a local hospital in a state of psychological breakdown.

·  Seventeen-year-old Y.K., detained in Manisa in a second operation in February 1996, reported that she was raped during seven days' incommunicado detention:

While two officers held my arms, two others held my legs and raped me. As I shouted at the moment, they closed my mouth with tape. I must have passed out later. When I regained consciousness, they squirted pressurized water on me, and put me into a cell again. The torture continued during the following days, too. I was suspended by the arms. While I was hanging they put electricity through my body via my fingertips, sexual organ, stomach, and mouth. I was interrogated six times. When I told the doctor at the hospital about the torture inflicted on me, I was tortured again. They first poured boiling water and then cold water on me. They tried to push my head inside the hole of the toilet.[4]

Police made attempts to suppress medical evidence of torture, but forensic medical reports for several of the detainees describe bruising and psychological trauma.

The events in Manisa might have passed unremarked as just another torture allegation but for the intervention of Sabri Ergül, who was then the Republican People's Party (CHP) parliamentary deputy for Izmir. Contacted by the detainees' families, he went to the Manisa Police Headquarters hoping to establish what was happening to the youngsters. Once inside, he found some of the youths: “While sitting in the section allocated for lawyers, I heard screams. . . . [W]hen I opened the door of a room where screams were coming from, I saw that two children had been stripped naked. One of them was on the floor. When I entered the second room, I saw that a girl had been stripped naked and was lying on the floor while two children, one of whom was a girl, had been kept standing naked.”[5] Appalled, Sabri Ergül made strenuous efforts to alert the authorities and the media, and subsequently supported the torture victims in their attempt to bring the torturers to justice.

Nearly six years later the trial against ten police officers continues, plagued by delay and intimidation of the plaintiffs and their counsel. Some of the young people are still suffering the psychological sequelae of torture. The accused officers were not suspended—most are still on duty and still carrying out duties which bring them in contact with detainees. This year the proceedings were delayed by one police officer's failure, for seven consecutive months, to appear and testify. When a parliamentary question was asked about the officer's failure to attend the court, the Interior Minister Saadettin Tantan responded in August 2000 that the officer "had not had time" to appear.

Children’s Deaths at the Hands of Police

On January 9, 1996, Çetin Karakoyun, fourteen years of age, died of a gunshot wound to the head during incommunicado detention at Magazalar Police Station in Mersin. The official explanation was that he had been killed accidentally by a police officer “playing with his gun,” but detainees frequently report being subjected to death threats by police officers holding a pistol to their head. An autopsy report documenting bruising to the lower part of Çetin Karakoyun's body suggests that he may have been subjected to torture. On May 8, 1996, a police officer was convicted of killing Çetin Karakoyun "through negligence and carelessness" and was fined US$30.

On August 16, 1999, a police officer clearing street vendors from the area in front of a local police station was witnessed beating and kicking one of them—fourteen year old Þaban Cadýroðlu—to death. Eight witnesses reported that they were detained and tortured so that they would sign exculpatory statements prepared by the police, and the boy's father stated that the director of the Public Order Branch of Van Police Headquarters had attempted to persuade him not to make an official complaint about the killing.

Reports of the Human Rights Commission of the Turkish Parliament

In May 2000 the Human Rights Commission of the Turkish Parliament published a series of reports showing that due to official insouciance and impunity, and in spite of public revulsion at the Manisa case, Turkish children are still at risk in police custody. Under the leadership of its president Sema Piskinsüt, parliamentary commission members made unannounced visits to police stations in Istanbul, Erzincan, Erzurum, Tunceli, and Sanliurfa. They interviewed and medically examined a large number of detainees. The torture of people detained under the Anti-Terror Law is well-documented, but in the past those detained for common criminal offences have been more reluctant to report abuses, fearing that such allegations may provoke reprisals or a heavier sentence for their own offence. Consequently, the torture of common criminal detainees remained largely unseen and unremarked. The Parliamentary Human Rights Commission was able to access places of detention and give detainees and former detainees confidence that they would be protected from reprisal. The testimony they obtained documented for the first time that people interrogated for common criminal offences are also routinely denied legal safeguards, such as access to a lawyer and, just as routinely, tortured.

In March 2000 the Parliamentary Human Rights Commission interviewed a number of juveniles at the Bakirkoy Prison for Women and Children. Two of their reports give the text of interviews with juveniles who were held at various police stations in Istanbul and who described being stripped naked and subjected to electric shocks, hosing with cold water under pressure, beating with a truncheon, falaka, and being forced to stand for hours in a chest-high barrel of water.[6] One fourteen-year-old described being interrogated under torture for eight days at Kadikoy Yeldegirmeni Police Station, and he told commission members where they could find pickaxe handles used for beating the soles of detainees' feet. When the Commission later went to the police station, the instruments were found just as the youngster had indicated. The long period of unsupervised police detention alone was in breach of the Turkish Criminal Procedure Code, quite apart from the abusive treatment, the lack of legal counsel and the failure to deliver the child to the public prosecutor.[7]

On the basis of leads given by young people interviewed at Bakýrköy Women and Children's prison, the Commission went to Istanbul's Küçükköy Police Station, located an apparatus used to suspend detainees by the arms, photographed it, and handed the photographs over as evidence for judicial proceedings. At the same police station, the Commission was told that a room with a locked door was "an unused storage room" to which the key had been lost. The Commission members broke a panel of the door and peered through to find that "all of the walls, including the door, were covered with yellow sponge, in order to give sound insulation . . . . Almost all of the children who had told the Commission that they had been tortured at this police station, had described this room covered in yellow foam."[8]

Incommunicado Detention

Of all the factors that contribute to the persistence of torture in Turkey, the most important is undoubtedly incommunicado detention.[9] Although Turkish regulation prohibits the incommunicado detention of children, this prohibition is not being enforced. Under the Anti-Terror Law, specifically, only adults can lawfully be held incommunicado, and then only for four days. Legal safeguards for children relating to their detention, referral to a prosecutor, and representation by a lawyer have recently been extended.[10] But regulations protecting children contain no sanctions against officers who violate them. Children are, in fact, very frequently questioned in police custody, rather than by the prosecutor, and without a lawyer present, an allegation confirmed by the findings of the Parliamentary Human Rights Commission. Detainees, including children, rarely get to see a lawyer at all while they are held in a police station. Police officers also sometimes register children at the station hours or days late (in order to extend the detention period and provide an opportunity for torture), and frequently fail to notify children’s relatives.

Recommendations

Human Rights Watch recommends that the Committee on the Rights of the Child:

·  Investigate the torture and ill-treatment of children and the practice of incommunicado detention in Turkey at the hands of police and gendarmes.

·  Urge the Turkish government to:

·  Clearly criminalize the practice of incommunicado detention of children, and adopt and enforce appropriate penalties for police officers and gendarmes who are found to have held a juvenile in custody without immediately notifying the prosecutor, interrogated a juvenile other than in the presence of a prosecutor, or failed to summon a lawyer for a child before he or she is questioned. Specifically, the Regulation on Apprehension, Police Custody and Interrogation should be amended to indicate possible administrative and judicial sanctions applicable to any officer who fails to comply with its provisions.

·  Vigorously prosecute police officers and gendarmes who have tortured or ill-treated children. Officers who are under investigation for torture should always be either transferred from active duty or suspended, and fired if convicted;