One year of Turkey's prisons: İHD report documents rights violations

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The Human Rights Association (İHD) Central Commission for Prisons released its "Monitoring Rights in Turkey's Prisons Report 2021."

Last year, the İHD Headquarters alone received applications from 901 prisoners through letters and their families or attorneys. This adds up to thousands of applications submitted to the association's 27 branches and eight representative offices.

Most of the applications were about the violations of the right to health and the prohibition of torture and degrading treatment and discrimination.

The 52-page report says the association received applications from prisons in almost every part of the country.

Releasing a map of the applications, the İHD said, "Even from this map alone, it is understood that rights violations in prisons are not limited to a certain region, but are spread all across Turkey."

Cold and uncomfortable wards

The report included a list of the cases of violations that prisoners were subjected to:

Overcrowded wards due to increase in the number of prisoners.

Delayed referrals of prisoners to the infirmary, long queues for referrals from the infirmary to tertiary health institutions or polyclinics.

The lack of health service capacity to handle intense demands for healthcare services.

Doctors are not always present in infirmaries.

Security officers do not remove handcuffs while prisoners are being examined, and doctors do not ask them to do so.

Pressures to search prisoners before being referred to health institutions and their referral to health institıtutions in one-cell shuttles, which especially affects asthma patients.

Delayed referrals to health institutions or not being referred at all.

Failure to release seriously ill prisoners despite being in the latest stages of their diseases.

Prisoners not really being treated but being given drugs with temporary effects.

The Forensic Medicine Institution (ATK) not giving decisions of release for ill prisoners due to political reasons.

Infussicient provisions.

Wards that are not heated and ventilated.

Problems in access to clean water. (AS/VK)