ANKARA, Turkey – Rights groups across Turkey are calling for the closure of five juvenile jails, after an incident where 50 guards allegedly attacked child inmates at the Sincan prison last month with metal objects, pepper gas and water guns.
The trouble reportedly began after a sick child could not get up from his bed during a roll call.
The incident led to 22 human rights and children’s groups unifying under “The Initiative to Close down Children’s Prisons,” which held simultaneous protests outside children’s prisons in five cities in Turkey on February 12.
“With shame and great concern in the name of humanity, we are following the torture, cruel and degrading treatment of children in the Pozanti, Sakran, Kurkculer and Antalya prisons, as well as the late incident at Sincan Prison,” the rights coalition said in a statement, read by activists in Diyarbakir, Ankara, Istanbul, Mersin and Izmir.
“It is clear that the state of the Republic of Turkey is violating international treaties by subjecting the child prisoners to degrading treatments,” said Hasan Erdogan, head of the initiative, who read the statement at a protest in Ankara.
“Child prisons do not prevent children from being driven to crimes. The state does not look after the children after they are released and it does not have any policy or practice to do that. So it should be seen and accepted that the child criminal justice system definitely does not attain its purposes,” he said.
“Given the number of child prisoners in our country, a new structure based on alternative measures that will render the child prisons unnecessary can be built for the benefit of the children,” Erdogan added.
The severe mistreatment of children at Ankara’s Sincan Prison came to light after Zekiye S., the mother of a juvenile inmate, went to visit her son on New Year’s Day last month.
“First, a child came and his clothes were torn apart. There were bruises and swellings on his face,” the mother said at a news conference in Ankara.
“Then my son came. He was not able to speak. He was trembling all the time. And I started crying. Then he said that when the warders came for roll call a problem had emerged and the children were attacked. A group of about 40 warders attacked 12 children in the ward,” she told reporters.
After the parents of children at the facility appealed for help, lawyers from five rights organizations visited the children in jail and filed a criminal complaint against the prison authorities.
Fatma Gunes, one of the lawyers who represents the children and is general secretary of the Human Rights Association (IHD), said at a press conference in Ankara that her group’s representatives had found the child prisoners battered and bruised, wearing very thin clothes that were stained in blood.
“The beatings started when a sick child did not want to get up from his bed when a warder went for roll call on January 1. About 40 warders got the children out of the ward while beating them and continuing to beat them in the corridor,” Gunes said.
She said that children at an adjoining ward heard the beatings and stacked up tables and chairs to prevent guards from entering their ward. The guards then used pressurized water and pepper gas on the children, handcuffed the boys in the back and did not allow them to be alone with doctors at the infirmary.
Some of the children at Sincan had been reportedly brought there after sexual abuse at the Pozanti Prison was exposed.
Rights organizations also reported that investigations have been launched against the child inmates, “on the grounds of battering the warders”.
Pinar Akdemir, a lawyer with the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), said the attack on the children was not unplanned. “The children who were attacked in that ward had been threatened by the warden for weeks,” Akdemir said, adding they had been prevented from seeking outside help.
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