The 42nd Session of the UN Human Rights Council is under way in Geneva. 

Today on the agenda of the General debate was item 3, Promotion and protection of all human rights, civil, political, economic, social and cultural, including the right to development.

MRAP (Mouvement contre le Racisme et pour l’Amitié entre les Peuples) and the African Agency for Integrated Development (AAID) drew attention to the situation in Turkey. 

In particular the MRAP expressed “its deep concern regarding violations of fundamental rights and freedoms in Turkey, particularly after the coup attempt of 15 July 2016. The independence of the judiciary is no longer ensured by the executive branch, which, on the contrary, has made it an instrument of repression that acts in an arbitrary and discriminatory way against thousands of alleged supporters of the coup d'état or members of the Kurdish minority.”

The MRAP also underlined that on August 19, 2019,the mayors of Diyarbakir, Van and Mardin were removed from office and nearly a thousand people were arrested in the south-eastern provinces, Kurdish majority.

The MRAP invited the Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers to “continue to pay particular attention to the situation in Turkey.”

 A second intervention by the African Agency for Integrated Development (AAID), also reminded that “no international accountability against Erdogan’s Government, the Turkish Army and their allied militant proxies have only continued their unrelenting terror on Afrin’s Kurdish population – who are suffering social oppression, economic robbery, and cultural annihilation.” 

The intervention recalled that “socially, the Kurds of Afrin are suffering arbitrary arrest, torture, rapes, assassinations, enforced disappearances at checkpoints, late-night abductions, burning down of their villages, and neighborhood demolition to build walls around the city. 

Economically, the Kurds of Afrin are suffering looting of stores, seizure of their homes, confiscation of land, forced sharia taxes, extortion of businesses, over 5,000 kidnappings for ransom, deliberate arson of over 11,000 hectares of forest, and the systematic theft of Afrin’s olive oil industry – which is then illegally sold in Europe. 

Culturally, the Kurds of Afrin are suffering demographic ethnic cleansing, Turkification of the education system and street names, destruction of Kurdish cultural monuments, vandalism of tombs, pillaging of grave sites, desecration of Alevi and Yazidi holy shrines, cutting down of sacred ribbon trees, and the archaeological excavation and smuggling of over 16,000 historical artifacts – which are then illegally sold to museums in Turkey.”