The F-Type Prison Crisis and the Repression of Human Rights Defenders in Turkey

In the early morning hours of 19 December 2000, over 10,000 members of the Turkish security forces commenced a simultaneous military raid into twenty prisons across Turkey. "Operation Return to Life", as this planned military intervention was called, aimed to enforce the transfer of over a thousand prisoners into Turkey's newly-constructed "F-type" prisons and to halt the widespread hunger strikes and "death fasts" of political prisoners who had been protesting since October 2000 against both the conditions of their detention and the introduction of 1- and 3-person isolation cells which characterise the "F-type" prisons. By the time this operation was over, 30 prisoners lay dead alongside two dead prison gendarmes.

Since the December 2000 operation, dozens of death fasters - all of them young prisoners and family members of prisoners between the ages of 19 and 45 - have also died, bringing the current total death toll of the Turkish prison crisis to over 80 dead with many others seriously wounded, victim to torture or left with devastating mental and physical damage due to prolonged hunger striking.

Between 5 - 11 May 2001, the Kurdish Human Rights Project, in conjunction with the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network (EMHRN), the World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT) and the Tunisian League for Human Rights (LTDH), sent a fact-finding mission to Istanbul and Ankara to investigate the events of the "Return to Life" prison operation and the repression of human rights defenders in the context of Turkey's current F-type prison crisis. The mission interviewed many individuals and organisations - both governmental and non-governmental - involved in the prison crisis including: relatives of political prisoners; a political prisoner from the Bayrampasa Prison who survived the ''Return to Life'' operation; the Ministry of Justice's Director General of Prisons and Detention Centres, Ali Suat Ertosun; and a wide range of independent human rights organisations. The mission also observed the 7 May 2001 hearing in a case against the headquarters of the Human Rights Association of Turkey (IHD) at the State Security Court in Ankara.