Turkeys western allies silent as 11 human rights activists are dragged to court
Turkey’s unabated march towards authoritarianism continues this week with the trial of 11 human rights workers there facing terrorism-related charges and up to 15 years in prison. Two of the defendants, Idil Eser and Taner Kilic, work for Amnesty International and are among the thousands who have been swept up in the crackdowns the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan have instituted since the attempted coup against him July 2016.
Recent visa-related spat aside, President Donald Trump has been largely supportive of Erdogan and his policies. According to Erdogan, Trump even apologized for a May fight between his security staff and protesters in Washington, D.C. in which arrest warrants were issued for twelve members of Erdogan’s security team. (The White House denies that Trump issued an apology for the fight.)
Eser, director of Amnesty International (AI) in Turkey, was among the ten rights activists arrested in July in what Andrew Gardner, an Istanbul-based AI researcher, described as a “routine workshop.” Kilic, chair of AI’s Turkey operations, had already been arrested in June, accused of having ties with Erdogan’s opposition and bete noir, dissident cleric Fethullah Gulen. He’s also accused of downloading ByLock, an encrypted messaging app Turkish police have said was used by Gulenists to plan the coup, although according to their own records, the use of ByLock is not a basis for arrest.
AI has received a list of the evidence against Eser, Kilic, and the other arrested rights activists, and has rejected them — and the case — as “politically motivated” and based on “trumped up terrorism charges.” Indeed, the evidence presented by the state against the rights activists looks familiar to many who have found themselves in court in an authoritarian state: innocuous text messages between activists are interpreted as attempts to organize “secret” meetings; enrolling a child in a school associated with Gulenists is taken as support for Gulen; asking workshop participants to turn off their phones during the event is seen as an attempt to avoid police detection.
https://thinkprogress.org/e-u-and-u-s-remain-silent-as-11-human-rights-activists-head-to-court-in-turkey-b724bb8348ca/
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