Amnesty International calls on UK to stand up to Turkey

AMNESTY International has called on the UK government to speak out after the human rights group’s top official in Turkey was arrested and remanded in custody while she awaits trial.

Idil Eser, Amnesty’s country director for Turkey, was one of 10 human rights workers arrested last week as part of a crackdown carried out by the Turkish government since last year’s failed coup attempt.

A judge ruled this week that six of the activists, including Miss Eser, must be held in prison until their trial on terrorism charges.

“What we’ve learnt today is that defending human rights has become a crime in Turkey,” said Andrew Gardner, Amnesty International’s Turkey researcher. The vast backlog of cases means they may be waiting in prison for years before the trial starts.

“This is absolutely extraordinary,” said Kate Allen, director of Amnesty in the UK, who said she was grateful for behind-the-scenes work of British officials and diplomats to try to free Miss Eser, but said the UK needed to speak out publicly against the Turkish crackdown. “Now is the time for the UK to stand up for us,” she said.

The Foreign Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Around 50,000 people have been arrested in Turkey since the failed military coup in July 2016, which tried to seize power from President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Like the Amnesty officials, many of them have been charged with membership of a terrorist organisation.

There is an irony to Mr Erdoğan’s government cracking down on Amnesty International – he was jailed by Turkey’s secular government in 1998 for reading an Islamist poem in public. Amnesty campaigned for his release and adopted him as a prisoner of conscience.

Miss Eser and the nine other activists were arrested on July 5 as they attended a workshop on digital security on an island south of Istanbul.

Four of those arrested were released on bail but six others – four Turks, one Swede and one German – were remanded in custody by a judge on Monday night.

Sweden’s foreign ministry was “concerned by the detention of a Swedish national,” a spokesman said.

Martin Schulz, Germany’s Social Democrat chief, hit back at Angela Merkel for her silence, telling weekly Der Spiegel that Erdogan was “dissolving democracy”.

“When Erdogan throws more journalists and human rights defenders in prison, it is no longer possible to be silent,” he said.