‘Police torture to be probed on disciplinary grounds’

* Photo: MA, camera footage of the moment of incident

Click to read the article in Turkish / Kurdish

On the night of November 18, a group of young people had a fight in Turkey's Kurdish-majority southeastern province of Diyarbakır. The police, as seen in the camera footage, arrived at the scene of the incident in Sur and rear-handcuffed and kicked one of the young people.

Human rights activist Alper Yalçın, seeing the footage, applied to the Presidency's Communication Center (CİMER).

While Yalçın noted in his application that the treatment of the police was "torture", he received a response from the CİMER, which said, "Your application has been forwarded to our Law Affairs and Investigation Branch Directorate with the aim of examining it in terms of discipline."

'Witnesses' sense of justice undermined'

Referring to the camera footage of the incident, which was first shared with the public by Mezopotamya Agency (MA) on November 21, lawyer Alper Yalçın said the following in his application to the CİMER:

"The violence inflicted by the police was recorded by a camera as well and it was shared as a video in the related news. In this video, it is seen that police officers, in breach of the prohibition of torture, rear-handcuffed the citizen and tortured him while he was in a defenseless state and they hurled threats against the people who were raising objections to this.

"This arbitrary attitude of the police has undermined the sense of justice of mine as a citizen as well as that of the people who witnessed this attitude in the neighborhood. I demand that administrative and judicial sanctions be imposed on the police officers so that we will not witness such an arbitrary attitude again within the framework of laws."

He referred to the Convention

Lawyer Alper Yalçın has said:

'The term "torture" means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.'

"The above paragraph has been quoted from the first article of the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which Turkey is a party to.

"While the exact same treatment by the police was the case in the video that I watched, the Diyarbakır Security Directorate investigates this crime of torture with regard to discipline, which also constitutes an attitude that protects the ones who commit this crime.

"I am ashamed of living in a country where a couple of police officers torture a citizen in the middle of the street as they wish and, then, remain if office without giving an account before the court.

Referred to police instead of prosecutor

"Besides, I chose the 'report' category during my application to the CİMER. I am surprised that the CİMER reported the crime of torture to the Diyarbakır Security Directorate instead of the prosecutor's office.

"We as citizens and the defenders of these rights must be able to make such applications even from our homes and workplaces, we must be able to ask questions to these mechanisms. It brings about a greater burden when we try to move on, feeling the burden of witnessing these crimes."

What happened?

On the night of November 18, a group of young people had a fight in Sur district in Turkey's Kurdish-majority southeastern province of Diyarbakır. The police, going to the scene of the incident, forced one young person to lie on the ground and handcuffed him behind his back.

The video footage of him while being battered by the police surfaced afterwards. In the footage, the plain clothes police officer kicked and battered him. The police also pushed the mother who protested her son being forced to lie on the ground flat on his face and battered by the police.

Minutes were taken down against the young person who was battered and rear-handcuffed on the grounds that "he resisted the police". He was arrested by the court for "resisting the police". (AÖ/SD)