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	Another 10,000 civil servants dismissed over Turkey coup by OHCHR, Deutsche Welle, news agencies Turkey   April 2017   Ahead of referendum, UN experts warn Turkey about impact of purge on economic, social and cultural rights. (OHCHR)   Turkey’s state of emergency has been used as a justification to undertake massive violations of the right to education and the right to work and to plunge many civil servants into poverty, according to United Nations experts.   “The dismissal of up to 134,000 public servants, without due process, compensation, or access to a proper remedy, for alleged links with organizations that the Government has chosen to proscribe, cannot be justified by reference to Turkey’s longstanding international human rights obligations,” said the experts ahead of this Sunday’s constitutional referendum.   They noted that even under a state of emergency, economic, social and cultural rights can only be limited in ways that respect the basic rights themselves and ‘solely for the purpose of promoting the general welfare in a democratic society’. “But there has been no attempt to show that these blanket measures, which have destroyed the careers and livelihoods of tens of thousands of persons, satisfy such criteria in each case,” they said.   The right to education has been targeted in an especially problematic way. A significant proportion of the public servants who were dismissed worked as school teachers or for the Ministry of National Education. Around 1000 schools and 15 universities are estimated to have been closed by emergency decree. Many of the dismissed public servants were trade union members, including more than 10,000 teachers who were members of the Education and Science Workers’ Union.   The closure of some 200 media outlets has not only caused thousands of journalists to lose their jobs and livelihoods, but has also undermined possibility of an informed debate over the referendum proposals.   Turkish citizens will vote on April 16 in a referendum on a proposed constitutional amendment that would, among other things, empower the President alone to declare future states of emergency and to determine the measures to be taken.   “Given the arbitrary and sweeping nature of the emergency decrees issued since July 2016, there is serious concern that such powers might be used in ways that exacerbate the existing major violations of economic, social and cultural rights”, said the experts, who are in contact with the Turkish Government over the issues. http://bit.ly/2nQomBg   Feb. 2017   Turkey is shrouded in fear with thousands arrested and claims of torture in wake of failed coup, writes a freelance journalist from Istanbul.   This week some court clerks, librarians and computer experts were among the 4,500 "dangers to the state" who were sacked by the Turkish Government.   It boosts the total to about 125,000 public servants already dismissed, and 40,000 arrested since last year''s failed coup.   I have reported from Turkey in easier times, and wanted to go behind the staggering statistics to find out what it means for people affected.   The streets of Istanbul seem eerie. Secret police dot Taksim Square, once thronged by spirited crowds, and there is a chill as I head to meet an old contact.   Three years ago "Deniz", a 26-year-old philosophy graduate, was an active voice in Turkey''s political reform movement.   Now she scans other cafe tables before she talks, fearful she may be arrested like hundreds of her colleagues, her friends, and her fiance.   "They have broken our resistance," she says sadly in a quiet corner. "It died after the coup, and now we have buried it."   Deniz watched as the unprecedented crackdown gathered pace. First it was military officers suspected of involvement in trying to oust President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, but it soon ballooned into a massive purge that still continues.   US-based Islamic cleric Fataleh Gulen is blamed as the instigator, and his followers, as well as teachers, journalists and judges — in fact anyone accused of holding independent views — have been sacked or arrested. There are frequent claims of torture.   A state of emergency continues, ceding extraordinary powers to the police, at the same time President Erdogan is tightening his grip on the country and seeking to increase his powers through constitutional change.   "If I post on Facebook," says Deniz, once a fearless activist, "then a day or two later they will come to take me away."   I last saw Deniz in 2014 hobbling on crutches after protests in Gezi Park calling for political reform. A police car moved slowly forward over her, breaking her leg in three places.   But she wasn''t cowed, still expressing her opinions unapologetically, she had spoken of a nationwide "awakening".   "At Gezi Park people were hopeful, brave, ready to sacrifice. We saw the power of our unity. We saw that we could win," she says now. "But so did the Government. So they changed everything."   Her world is shattered. Her father and uncle, both university professors, were fired and now scratch a living selling fish by the river.   Deniz''s fiance languishes in prison. He was a journalist working in an independent newsroom that was raided by police, and closed.   All but government sponsored media has been shut down, and internet sites are restricted. As she spoke a man pulled up a chair conspicuously within earshot, in an otherwise empty cafe. "Civil police," Deniz whispers. "They are everywhere now."   Ordinary Turks ravaged by the purge are struggling for justice in a system that''s rigged against them.   One exhausted mother now heads her extended family, and battles each day with no income.   "I am taking care of 13 people, nine are children," says the woman who prefers not to be named, from her home in the ancient city of Antalya on the Mediterranean coast. "All the men of the family are under arrest and we have no salary."   After the coup police burst into her home, and arrested her son, who has a young baby and four-year-old child.   Though unemployed for two years, he once worked for the Cihan News Agency which had alleged Gulenist links.   At dawn the following day, police returned and handcuffed her son-in-law Eyup, a geography teacher at the local high school, leaving her daughter, Asuman, inconsolable.   "My husband kissed our children while they were sleeping, then the police just took him," she says.   Asuman''s father, a retired school teacher asked the police why they weren''t arresting terrorists, or thieves? A few hours later police came back and took him.   This middle class family of teachers is destroyed. The family tried many times to deliver heart medication and clean clothes to their father in detention but were turned away.   When the youngest son, Yusuf, became angry, he was also arrested. And when another son flew in from France to help, he too was arrested for not carrying his identity card.   The women of the family have been fired, and their teaching licences revoked. The father''s retirement salary was stopped the day he was arrested and all of their savings have been seized by the state. They are destitute.   This case has been documented by human rights activists, though they say it is not extraordinary.   "Unfortunately these cases are not the exception," says a spokesman for Turkey Purge, which works anonymously gathering information on the purges.   With no assistance from police, Asuman eventually found her husband Eyup in hospital, undergoing surgery for a ruptured intestine. He had been stripped naked, blindfolded, and tortured.   Eyup documented the police beatings in a statement: "They beat me on the soles of my feet, on my stomach, then squeezed my testicles, saying they would castrate me," he says, going on to detail extremely brutal assaults.   After three weeks in hospital, he is now back in the over-crowded prison with the rest of the men in the Ozdemir family awaiting trial.   Getting a fair trial is doubtful. Lawyers and judges are still being arrested, often for defending or acquitting detainees. Those remaining on the bench have been galvanised into political loyalty.   "One judge was arrested while hearing a case," says Turkey Purge.   Another man, speaking in Ankara, detailed the 13 days of torture his 66-year-old father endured, including having his toenails pulled out. His trial is scheduled for February 20.   The man fears for his own safety, and knows many who have been arrested and tortured, including his brother-in-law.   "It''s always the same. Everyone is taken for interrogation and tortured for at least the first few weeks," he says, wanting to remain anonymous.   "They break bones, deprive them of food and water, they use electric shocks, all kinds of horrors."   Despite the crackdown, or perhaps because of it, President Erdogan''s AKP party still holds a majority popularity. Millions are drawn to the increasingly authoritarian strongman.   "We need a strong leader," says store owner Ahmet Kapucuoglu. "We voted for our President because we need someone powerful and fearless. We all stand behind him."   On the streets, a weakening economy and repeated terror attacks by Islamic State and Kurdish separatists has lead to political and economic anxiety.   Turkish political analyst Bayram Balci says "the nightmare" began in 2011, when the Government started severely limiting freedom of speech and criticisms of the ruling party.   Now the President is campaigning for an April referendum in his country of 80 million to grant him near absolute powers.   The possibility of him winning was recently listed as one of the "top 10 risks" for the world in 2017 by political consultancy Eurasia Group.   "Erdogan''s drive to centralise powers will exacerbate many of the existing pressures on Turkey''s domestic governance, economy, and foreign relations," the report concludes.   Analysts fear the country is becoming unstable, focusing on internal dissent while millions of refugees gather in border camps.   "Unfortunately because of the Syrian crisis, the development of authoritarianism and excessive polarisation of society, there is a risk of civil war," Bayram Balci says.   For Asuman''s mother, nothing makes sense, all she can do is wait. "How will the authorities ever be able to repair all this grief and trauma?" she asks.   October 2016   Ankara''s post-coup purge has seen over a hundred thousand lose their jobs. A new set of emergency powers has also given President Erdogan more control of the media and universities.   Thousands of teachers, health workers, and academics were fired in Turkey late on Saturday for having ties to exiled cleric Fethullah Gulen. The US-based Gulen, a former ally and now bitter rival of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has been blamed for a failed coup in July.   Gulen has denied any involvement, but that has not stopped Turkish authorities from pursuing a massive crackdown on the civil service, educational institutions, and the media. On Saturday, a new emergency rule decree not only saw the 10,000 workers dismissed, but also shut down 15 media outlets, most of them in the predominantly Kurdish southeast.   The new rules also revoked the right for universities to elect their rector. Erdogan will now chose rectors himself based on a pool of candidates selected by the High Education Board.   The purge in the wake of the attempted coup has also cost the jobs of 100,000 judges, prosecutors, security officers and civil servants. Over 160 media outlets have also been shut down since the government declared a state of emergency in July. Ankara has defended the crackdown as necessary to root out those who seek to undermine the state.   July''s aborted coup killed 240 people when a faction of Turkey''s armed forces tried to overthrow Erdogan over what they claimed was his attempt to destroy Turkish secularism.   * A coalition of 14 leading international press freedom and freedom of expression organisations have condemned as an “extraordinary attack on press freedom” the jailing of top journalists with Turkey’s Cumhuriyet newspaper and the closure of 15 pro-Kurdish media in a letter to leading Turkish officials.   On Monday, October 31, Turkish authorities launched a mass operation against Cumhuriyet, a secular daily considered one of the last opposition media voices in Turkey. Police arrested nearly a dozen journalists, managers and lawyers, including Editor-in-Chief Murat Sabuncu and columnist Kadri Gürsel, a member of the International Press Institute (IPI)’s global Executive Board.   The coalition said today it was “deeply disturbed” by the attack both against “a highly respected newspaper that remains one of Turkey’s last sources of critical news and information and a representative of a major international human rights organisation”.   (External Link: http://bit.ly/2eZNjnU http://bit.ly/2fwaJih ) Visit the related web page
	Out of sight: the orphanages where disabled children are abandoned by Disability Rights International, agencies   NGO Disability Rights International has campaigned for institutions to be closed for years but despite progress, there are still shocking instances of abuse, writes Naomi Larsson.   A dozen children with cerebral palsy lie on thin mattresses on the floor of a spacious room. A smell of cleaning products unsuccessfully masks the scent of urine.   Nearby, five children are tied to a rough metal frame. They are bandaged from the waist to the ankles, their hands bandaged too, looking half mummified in an attempt to teach them how to stand.   There are 19 patients in total at Asociación Hogar Infantil San Luis Gonzaga, an institution located in Mexico City. They are aged between nine and 40, but the eldest look like teenagers – their bodies haven’t fully grown and they seem absent from their surroundings. Most still wear diapers.   All were brought here by their families, but just half of them have sporadic contact with their relatives. As long as the monthly fees are paid (from £29 to £185, depending on the family’s financial situation) the child is allowed to remain there.   Here, time seems to have halted: teaching materials, orthopaedic contraptions, and physiotherapy techniques go back 30 years. Even the patient care model, which focuses solely on physical therapy, denies the residents any basic entertainment or volition, and essential personal support.   Video footage taken inside the institution in May this year by NGO Disability Rights International (DRI) shows 10-year-old Leonardo, who is autistic, fastened in a wheelchair. His wheelchair is tied to the neighbouring crib so that he is unable to move – even though he is capable of walking. This set up is not to punish him, says a staff member, but to keep him safe and stop him from throwing himself off the chair. His family live six hours from Mexico City, and are not financially able to take care of him.   Another video shows a boy who appears to be in his early teens with cerebral palsy lying in his bunk, banging his teeth on the wooden sides. The side boards are heavily marked by the force of his head and teeth against the wood. When the child opens his mouth, there are teeth missing.   Up to eight million children live in orphanages across the world, despite more than 90% having at least one living parent.   Disabled children are overwhelmingly represented, and can remain in institutionalised care for life. Harrowingly, young adults raised in institutions are 500 times more likely kill themselves.   For the last 13 years DRI has been working on a worldwide campaign to shut down orphanages and institutions that, in far too many cases, neglect or even abuse the rights of the children. In particular, they focus on people with disabilities.   Over their years of research, DRI has documented abuse within state-run, and donor-funded facilities – including orphanages and psychiatric wards – from the Ukraine to Guatemala. In the process they have exposed institutionalisation as a worldwide human rights issue.   Last year, when investigating Mexican institutions for children with disabilities, DRI found “atrocious abuses that fall inside the definition of torture”. Investigators recorded prolonged use of restraints in centres – like those in San Luis Gonzaga – that caused high levels of suffering, physical deformities and dislocations. Any restraint of people with mental disabilities “even for a short period of time, may constitute torture and ill-treatment”, according to the UN’s rapporteur on torture.   In Paraguay, researchers found autistic children locked in cages at a state-run hospital. The children were only allowed to spend a few hours every other day in an outdoor “pen littered with excrement, garbage and broken glass”, as DRI described it.   There have been reports of forced sterilisation of patients in Mexico – some pressured by health professionals – to cover up sexual abuse within an institution. In Ukraine, the teams discovered that children were given classifications depending upon the “severity” of their disability. Children classed as level three or four were considered to be “uneducable”, and were expected to remain in an institution for life.   Though the organisation has come across well-equipped, clean facilities and many families believe they’re doing the right thing for their children, DRI’s president Laurie Ahern maintains “there is no such thing as a good orphanage. Nothing replaces a family. Children still have psychological and developmental delays – you need someone to look into your eyes, a primary caregiver, and that doesn’t happen in an orphanage.”   “Even in the best of institutions children don’t get their full needs met,” says Helen Dent, professor of clinical and forensic psychology at Staffordshire University. Dent watched DRI’s videos from the institution in Mexico, and her impression is of a “clean and modern” facility where “the staff are trying to care for the children with apparently few resources”.   She adds: “The young man banging his teeth against the cot side was clearly in need of adult attention both to stop him from self-harming and to provide positive stimulation to remove the need for self-harm. Most people kept in such circumstances would suffer serious consequences and show unusual behaviours.”   The alternative, argues DRI, should be that development funding is moved to community- and family-based care. Their campaign is a monumental task that requires changing mindsets on a global scale.   It was after visiting the Samuel Ramirez psychiatric hospital in Mexico City more than 20 years ago that Eric Rosenthal decided to found DRI.   With a slight tremble in his voice he recalls an area surrounded by barbed wire where both children and adults were held naked. “They were literally hosed off to be cleaned. They were fed on trays.. they all lunged for common food and had to fight over it,” he says. “They were tied down. It was the most horrendous dehumanisation. These people look like animals when they’re left this way, and that’s how they were treated.”   Rosenthal, 52, studied both mental health and international human rights before turning to law. A lifelong activist, he strongly felt the rights of people with disabilities had been overlooked by the international development and human rights communities. DRI was established with a $20,000 fellowship in an empty office in Washington DC.   The organisation bases its model on Amnesty International, researching and exposing injustices to push for change. Over the past two decades, Rosenthal has visited hundreds of institutions in more than 30 countries, accompanied by a team of volunteers who are often medical experts.   The team is small, but they’ve made some genuine advances over the years. DRI now has offices in Mexico, Guatemala, Ukraine and Serbia, and have produced 18 major investigative reports. An expose of abuse in one particular facility that DRI collaborated on with the New York Times Magazine, contributed to the historic 2006 UN treaty on people with disabilities, which called for disabled people to have the same human rights as the able bodied.   The organisation’s work has also led to the European Union introducing a policy where European money cannot be used for maintaining any kind of institution. And in Serbia, DRI’s efforts have led to a law that children under the age of three can’t be institutionalised. Serbia now has one of the lowest percentages of children in institutions – though the number of institutionalised children with disabilities remains high.   After the landmark UN treaty – the DRI focused its efforts on stopping new entrants to existing facilities. “It’s a lot easier to establish international law than enforce that law,” Rosenthal says. “If we could get countries to agree on a moratorium of no new admissions to institutions, then they would whittle [the numbers] away – it would save families, save kids at the most vulnerable point in their lives. And that was Laurie’s idea.”   Laurie Ahern, 62, is the brainchild of DRI’s global campaign to end institutionalisation. Rosenthal sings her praises, and when speaking to her on the phone from her office in DC, it’s not hard to see why. Her passion for the cause is admirable. She cares deeply for her colleagues and seems to dedicate every waking hour to this campaign.   “We’re exporting a model that we know is harmful to children,” Ahern says. “When I began visiting orphanages and institutions for children some 13 years ago, and witnessed unimaginable human rights abuses and torture perpetrated against children – left to die lonely painful deaths, immobile children left in cribs for years, no touch, no love – I knew we had to do something big.”   “It’s something that we can change,” she adds. “This is really not a complicated problem; this is about donors putting money to families and not supporting orphanages.”   Other organisations such as Lumos, the charity founded by JK Rowling, also campaign for deinstitutionalisation, and Lumos has just launched a global campaign to raise awareness of the issue. DRI, Lumos and other organisations including the Replace Campaign all support the idea that we should change this culture of institutionalisation and work on keeping families together, supporting communities, and improving social networks.   Lumos believes that the institutionalisation of children can be eradicated globally by 2050 (backing this statement with figures including the 70% reduction of the number of children in institutions in Moldova over the last decade, despite the country’s high poverty rates).   There is also an economic argument, Ahern adds: “It’s so much less expensive for government to support families to help children with disabilities go to school, than it is to pay to keep them in an orphanage for a long time.”   For example, in Tanzania’s Kagera region, the yearly cost for one child in institutional care is reportedly $1,000 – six times the cost of supporting a child in foster care. And in Romania, residential care for children costs up to $280, while family reintegration and local adoption costs about $19 per child.   But in many senses they’re fighting an uphill battle. Institutionalisation is still a development model – and in some countries it even constitutes a method of tourism, or voluntourism – supported by donors and governments.   Money is a big problem. There is little or no funding for the services that can prevent family separation or for social care networks. Any funding that does come through is often used to renovate or reopen institutions, especially facilities for people with disabilities, rather than support the structures that can help replace them.   Although 32 state-run institutions in Georgia were shut and replaced with family and community-based services in the last decade, a 2013 DRI investigation found that US government money had funded two institutions specifically for disabled people, in the years since. Between 2008-2012, €5.6m of EU funding was spent on renovating children’s institutions and those for people with disabilities in just one county in the Czech Republic. Despite this investment, the quality of care did not improve and the Czech ombudsman still reported concerns over serious neglect and abuse in these facilities.   But for Ahern and her colleagues there is no question of giving up. In recent years the investigations have become even more nefarious than I thought they ever could be – the trafficking of children for sex, pornography, organ trafficking. There’s no way I can put that into the back of my mind and just let it go.”   Ahern believes that children left in institutions, especially those with disabilities, are forgotten. “When no one’s watching out for children – whether that’s conflict or an orphanage – bad things happen to children. There’s a sphere for abuse and neglect.”   One of the most extreme cases of neglect she has seen was in the Tbilisi Infants Home in Georgia, where children with hydrocephalus – a buildup of fluid in the brain – were left untreated, which is extremely painful and life-threatening. “Babies, six months old with large heads were just laying there moaning. I was overwhelmed with grief because we know the problem can be taken care of and the child can have a perfectly normal life,” she says. The NGO found more than 50% of the children with this treatable condition died in the institution.   “You can’t see this and not be moved,” Ahern says. She tells me about the time when, a few years ago, she walked into a Serbian institution to find teenagers with cerebral palsy who looked like children because they had not been allowed to leave their beds in 10 years. Worse, this was not the first time she had come across this situation.   “But you can take action, get a little angry, and then you see change. You see people’s minds change, and we see money change from funding orphanages because of that. That’s the only way for me to deal with this.” Visit the related web page
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