I remember getting interested in human rights at primary school. I gave presentations in class about, for example, the work of Amnesty International, which totally impressed me. Prison guards beating up prisoners or secret services making them ‘disappear’, (my main obsessions at the time), I just couldn’t comprehend. Turkey was one of the countries I read about. …
No no no, the youtube ban has not been lifted. Newspapers all over the world announced this on Tuesday, and I was embarrassed about missing it. How can I check almost every day and still not notice, what’s wrong with me? I read about how some parts of the country are taking longer to reconnect - something that I totally …
Lots of criticism this week of the Labour Minister, who suggested that the Tuzla shipyards be closed or replaced in a bid to solve the safety problems endemic there. The immediate reason behind his ‘plan’ are three more deaths this week in Tuzla. What happened? A life boat needed to be tested. Officially the test …
Quite a fuss this week in the Netherlands about immigration laws. A judge ruled that it is not legal to ask non EU citizens to do a language and culture test before coming to the Netherlands to get married or to reunite with their family. The test has been common practice for some years now, …
A total of 98 deaths in the last seven years: the shipbuilding business is booming in Turkey, but to achieve this growth the safety of the workers has been neglected. Turkey’s biggest shipbuilding area is Tuzla, south of Istanbul. Workers went on strike last Monday to demand safer working conditions, but when I went to take a look, I saw …
It’s exactly a month ago today that youtube.com was again closed in Turkey. Previous closures usually didn’t last so long, and this time it’s even a ‘double closure’: when you try to open the site, you now get two notifications of court orders banning youtube. On the other hand, all the wordpressblogs are …
Busy times for weekly comic magazine Leman. In court, that is. Last week finally an old case against them came to an end. The High Court did not convict Leman, for the same reason as a lower court last year rejected Erdogan’s complaint regarding a cover on which Erdogan was shown as a tick: the cartoon …
In the world-wide demonstrations and protests held to mark International Labour Day, only in Turkey did things get out of hand. Police used water cannons and tear gas on demonstrators heading for Taksim Square. Why? Because their demonstration was ‘illegal’. Why? Well, easy: the authorities prohibited a Labour Day march, officially …
‘More freedom of opinion in Turkey’, I read in a newspaper. If only that were true. Another newspaper was more accurate, their headline said: Turkey changes article 301. The changes that have been made to the article that was misused many times to shut up writers, journalists and publishers for ‘insulting Turkishness’, will probably only change the prosecutors strategies in …
Newsflash! Governing party AKP is about to change the infamous penal code article 301! Many papers put it on the front page and the press outside Turkey also picked up the story. I recall how last December the same news was spread around. I rushed to write an article on how different human rights activists …
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