Sick political prisoners

RELEASE AHMET ÖZKAN IMMEDIATELY

RE: AST URGES TURKISH AUTHORITIES TO RELEASE AHMET ÖZKAN and ALL THE ELDERLY and SEVERELY SICK INMATES IN TURKEY’S PRISONS.

Ahmet Zeki Özkan, a 65-year-old stage 4 cancer patient, has been arbitrarily imprisoned despite the medical reports stressing the severity of his condition.

Ahmet Zeki Özkan was sentenced to 6 years and 3 months in prison for his alleged ties with the Gülen Movement and taken to Antalya L-Type Prison, after the Supreme Court upheld the verdict. Özkan had to stay in the quarantine cell for a week and because there was no bed he had to lie down on the floor. He caught the flu there.

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NUSRET MUGLA’S TRAGIC DEATH

ON THE OCCASION OF NUSRET MUGLA’S TRAGIC DEATH AST BRINGS THE URGENT SITUATION OF ELDERLY AND SERIOUSLY ILL PRISONERS TO ATTENTION AND URGES THE GOVERNMENT OF TURKEY TO RELEASE THEM EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY

84-year-old Nusret Sağlam died on February 14 due to COVID-19 he contracted in prison where he was held captive on the grounds of having an account at Bank Asya – one of the hundreds of companies shut down following the July coup attempt in 2016. States are obliged to protect the right to life of those deprived of their liberty and to ensure that they can benefit from health services at least as much as free individuals. The death of Sağlam, who struggled in the severely adverse conditions of prison despite his old age, is no different from a murder due to the reckless neglect of a most basic human right.

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Sick and Elderly Political Prisoners IN ERDOGAN’S TURKEY – Special Report

Introduction

The jails in Turkey have long been mentioned in the same breath as inhumane actions and the breach of even the most basic rights, especially against the political prisoners. The violations have reached to unprecedented levels in parallel with the emergence of the current political-Islamist authoritarianism. The oppressive regime under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s rule instrumentalized the country’s legal system to muzzle the political dissidence, turning the prisons into concentration camps. The number of inmates behind the bars has reached historic highs. Hosting convicts much more than their capacities, the prisons, which were already substantially subpar, have fallen way below the minimum acceptable standards for human dignity. Patients in particular bore the most of the brunt of this precipitated deterioration of the prison conditions and the wrath of the Turkish regime against its opponents.

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