Lechery soon to be banned

ANKARA - Employers will be liable to protect their workers not only against sexual harassment but also against mobbing, the Justice Committee decided with an amendment to the law of obligations.

The committee extended the scope of the current law to include mobbing, which is also known as bullying, among causes that violate personal values Wednesday.

"An employer will be liable to protect employees with good relations, show respect, keep an honest order in the work place and take measures to guarantee that his employees do not encounter sexual harassment and mobbing," the amended article said.

It added that an employer is also responsible to take necessary measures to protect those who have already encountered such incidents.

Besides taking employee’s personal values under the protection of the employer, the draft law also brought new arrangements for wages. The amendment covered the wages of employees like maids and nurses, who live together with the employer. The old article, which said that accommodation and food cost of those employees are deducted from their salaries, was removed. The article on deduction of cost for a damaged cot from an employee’s salary was stipulated as well. The amendment says the court should prove deliberate damage by a worker. The commission also decided that salaries would no longer be paid in cash but via bank accounts.

Court redefines marriage
Meanwhile, a court in Ankara ordered the protection of a unofficially married woman from her partner last week in a decision that is expected to set a precedent for similar cases.

According to NTV, the decision is important because until now courts only ordered protection from husbands for women who were officially married. The 1998 law on protection of families was always interpreted as protecting women with officially sanctioned marriages. Couples with religious marriages and divorced women were not included.

The Ankara court based its decision on the European Court of Human Rights and the convention preventing discrimination against Women, arguing that the practical form, not the official state of the marriage, should be taken into account. It said family could not be limited to officially sanctioned marriages.

Lawyer Canan Arın praised the court. The case involved the protection of a woman physically abused by her live-in boyfriend. The woman receivedfour months of state protection.

Hurriyet

Sexuality’s new frontier lashes back

ISTANBUL - Efforts to reverse progress in women’s rights are filtering through Turkish authorities, says pioneer in Turkey’s women’s movement, Pinar İlkkaracan. She talks with the Daily News about local power and a new book she has edited on sexuality in the Middle East.

Since the progress on the Turkish Penal Code in 2004, a clear backlash has emerged from all sides, says a leading women's advocate and editor of a new book on sexuality in the Middle East, Pınar İlkkaracan. "First it’s coming from the government itself and filters through the police and the judiciary," she said, citing examples from morality language in the government’s proposed constitution this year to the arrest of an "inadequately clothed" fisherwoman in central Istanbul. But at the local level in Turkey, change is happening. Such was the case in Van last week with the formation of a municipality gender equality commission, she noted.

Pioneering reforms to ground women's full equality in the legal system, the rights organization İlkkaracan founded and directs, Women for Women's Human Rights (WWHR), launched a human rights training program in Turkey 10 years ago that has trained more than 3,000 women in intensive 4.5 month programs. The grassroots aim was to prevent hierarchy and disseminate the trainings by encouraging trainees to establish their own local organizations. What little good news there is to report on behalf of Turkish women emanates from these local groups and the changes they have brought about in their communities, İlkkaracan told the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review.

Even when they are discouraged by family and neighbors, Turkish women come to the trainings hungry for information, she said. "One woman brought her husband to demonstrate her story at a recent training near Ankara. She had felt like "a nobody" at the beginning, but her life changed with the training, İlkkaracan recalled her saying. "Then her husband got up and said he had become a happier man in a better marriage because of the trainings."

In Cannakale, ever since women mobilized the local power structure, the city "checks with its women’s group before building a road." "I can’t believe what they have done in Cannakale. The local group ELDER started with police training and now all the people in the city are gender sensitive," she laughed.

The backlash of progress
The women’s movement was key in achieving the radical reform despite Turkey’s ruling religious conservative government, succeeding in radically transforming the Turkish Penal Code in 2004. All references to traditions such as morality, chastity, honor or virginity were removed from the Code. "This was the point when the state should have started creating discourse and national action programs," she said. "What we’ve seen was exactly the opposite."

İlkkaracan said despite the need to focus on education and job creation, the prime minister declared a few months ago that Turkish women should have at least three children. "This is a very clear violation of reproductive rights that were established in 1994 at a UN conference and undersigned by Turkey." Through the efforts of women around the world, this was a progressive document accepting that women had the right to decide how many children they would have and how they should space them. "But how can we expect to improve reproductive rights when women don’t have access to information and health materials?" she asked.

İlkkaracan said the government’s repeated "references to morality imply that women’s bodies are the property of their family and the nation," she said. She then pointed to a meeting at Ministry of Justice last month as another example of the official effort to undermine women’s rights. Judges and bureaucrats proposed lowering the age of consensual sex from 15 to 14 and the jail term for marital rape from seven years to one.

’Deconstructing Sexuality in the Middle East’
İlkkaracan is the co-founder of The Coalition for Sexual and Bodily Rights in Muslim Societies, an international network of 38 NGOs and academics from 14 countries working toward promotion sexual and bodily rights in the Middle East/ North Africa and South/Southeast Asia. A veteran participant of UN meetings and conferences on women's human rights, she is the editor of Women and Sexuality in Muslim Societies which has been translated from English into Arabic and Turkish. Most recently, İlkkaracan edited a book published in September called "Deconstructing Sexuality in the Middle East: Challenges and Discourses"

The book’s contributors from Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Pakistan, Palestine and Turkey illuminate how the discourses and debates cannot be reduced to a single factor such as religion or a tension between the religious right and feminists. In the book’s introduction, İlkkaracan addresses sexuality as a contested political domain in the Middle East. In the following chapter, she examines how adultery nearly derailed Turkey’s aspirations of joining the European Union. Subsequent chapters include examinations of honor crimes through civil society in Jordan, secular and religious discourses around sex education in Lebanon and sexuality in post-revolutionary Iran.

Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian examines predominant attitudes toward rape in contemporary Palestinian society. "It is sad that in this region in particular militarization plays a major role not only in creating a nationalist ideology in which women’s bodies become carriers of the nation but also in generating sexual violence," İlkkaracan said.

"We need to find our own voice," she said. With this book reflective of an expanding transnational discourse, the voices speak with a command of the complexities and depth of experience.


To order the book, visit:www.ashgate.com

Hurriyet,Saturday, December 13, 2008

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Turkey's efforts in human rights to be maintained - foreign minister

Turkish Foreign Minister Ali Babacan said Wednesday that the country has made remarkable progress in this field of human rights under the guidance and expectations of its citizens, and our international obligations, in a message delivered to mark Human Rights Day.

“Efforts in this field will be maintained resolutely," Babacan said in his December 10, Human Rights Day message to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations General Assembly.

“The Declaration still continues to be the most significant reference document on fundamental rights and freedoms," he said.

Babacan said that Turkey was among the first countries to adopt the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adding, "respect for human rights, which is based on the principles of equality of individuals before law and non-discrimination, is one of the non-amendable tenets of the Constitution of the Republic of Turkey.

"Violations of rights arising from disputes are also followed closely and common efforts are employed with a view to taking preventive measures. Prevention of such violations shall continue to be one of the principles which Turkey shall defend and which shall shed light on its assessments, during its non-permanent membership to the U.N. Security Council for the following two years," he said.

Babacan added, "On this occasion, I wish to reiterate my conviction that human rights will be further respected with each passing day both in our country and the world and I congratulate the Human Rights Day of our nation and the international community." Hurriyet

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Human rights group says police violence on rise in Turkey

A human rights organization said in a report released Friday that Turkey's failure to prosecute police officers has resulted in a rise in police violence. (UPDATED)

Human rights group says police violence on rise in Turkey

New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported at least 28 cases of police violence since 2007, including excessive use of force on demonstrators and police shootings that resulted in at least seven deaths.

Under reforms aimed at winning entry to the EU, Turkey made progress to stamp out torture and ill-treatment of detainees.

But police use of violence has increased following changes to the law in June 2007 which give police broad powers to use lethal force and encourage arbitrary searches, the group said.

The group said people filing complaints against police are often prosecuted for forcibly resisting police, while investigations into complaints are often tainted by police interference.

A European Commission report last month on Ankara's progress towards EU entry also mentioned a rise in reports of torture.

"Victims of police violence we interviewed frequently told us that the police feel untouchable," the report said.

According the justice ministry statistics, 2,854 complaints were filed against police in 2006 for alleged torture or excessive use of force and 3,339 in 2007. There were 104 convictions in 2006 and 48 in 2007.

In a major sign of that Turkish police has been a fear factor in the society; five suspects, dressed as police, raided a crowded restaurant in Istanbul and kidnapped a woman and then raped her for six hours. The attackers faced no resistance or questioning during the incident.

HRW urged the government to take measures to tackle the problem, among them the establishment of an independent police complaints authority to investigate police misconduct, strict monitoring of exercise of stop-and-search powers and action to ensure rapid prosecution of abusive officers.Hurriyet

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Torture death divides parties

ANKARA - Parliament discussed the human rights situation in Turkey yesterday, while a parliamentary commission unanimously adopted a report on the death of Engin Çeber by torture that saw a spat of words pass between parties.

Torture death divides parties

During the meeting, a discussion took place between Mehmet Ekinci of the Nationalist Movement Party, or MHP, and Akın Birdal of the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party, or DTP.

Ekici said there was an instruction from the outlawed Revolutionary Left, or Dev-Sol, organization that urged resistance to the police and said the swelling on Çeber’s head while in custody could have been caused by such resistance.

"All of these cases must be investigated and reports must be written objectively," he said, and added individuals had responsibilities to the state just as the state was in charge of torture and ill treatment cases.

"In the Engin Çeber case there was both an active part and another part, in which he was subjected to ill treatment. These two parts should be separated from one another and clearly explained in the report," he said.

His remarks drew criticism from Birdal who said torture was a crime against humanity in international human rights and humanitarian law. He said an individual who was detained during a peaceful demonstration had the right to resist. "Human rights law comes out of the legitimacy of the right to resistance. Therefore, torture is a crime against humanity. This crime can in no way be defended."

Zafer Üskül, head of Parliament’s Human Rights Commission, said the state had the right to self-protection. "And therefore, the state will protect its self-legitimacy," he added.

State accepts responsibility
Çeber died from injuries he received at the Metris Prison in Istanbul. In the first public statement of its kind, Justice Minister Mehmet Ali Şahin accepted state responsibility in the case.

Meanwhile, Üskül will participate in an international conference in the Armenian capital of Yerevan bringing together ombudsmen from the Council of Europe and Central Asian countries May. 25 to 26, 2009. the MHP’s Ekici criticized the visit to Armenia. Hurriyet

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