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Sweeping security measures adopted in Turkey after a failed July 15 coup attempt created an environment conducive to the torture and ill-treatment of detainees despite the presence of legal safeguards, a UN expert said on Friday.
Briefing reporters in Ankara, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer said he had visited numerous prisons and met with Turkish officials as well as individuals detained over their alleged involvement in the botched coup.
He says “torture and other forms of ill-treatment seem to have been widespread in the days and weeks following the failed coup,” particularly at the time when they were detained.
Melzer spoke at the end of a six-day visit to Turkey to look into torture and will present his findings in March 2018 to the UN Human Rights Council. After visiting detention facilities in Ankara, Diyarbakir, Sanliura and Istanbul, he described overall detention conditions as satisfactory.
But the expert expressed concern over emergency measures such as the extension of pre-trial detention to 30 days and denying a detainee access to a lawyer for up to five days.
“Worldwide experience shows us that it is precisely in the first hours and days after arrest that the risk of abuse, including torture and other forms of ill-treatment, is highest,” he said.
He urged the Turkish government to live up to its declared “zero tolerance” policy on torture.
“There is … an environment of intimidation in Turkey that is conducive to torture and ill-treatment and the authorities although they have a policy of zero tolerance for torture they are not following up to investigate these allegations,” he later told in an interview.
The expert’s preliminary findings echo those of Human Rights Watch, which documented 13 cases of alleged abuse in an October report, and Amnesty International, which says it has it has collected “credible evidence” of torture by police in Ankara and Istanbul.
Turkish officials have dismissed allegations of torture as baseless claims and propaganda.
“Ahead of the coup we were already receiving very serious reports of torture and ill-treatment, mostly in the southeast of Turkey,” said Amnesty International’s Turkey researcher, Andrew Gardner.
“But what we saw after the violent coup attempt of July 15 was an explosion in the number of cases.”
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