Covid-19 Exposes a Fatal Threat in Turkey’s Over-Crowded Prisons
Only three weeks after the government’s exclusive amnesty bill, reports of COVID-19 cases in some prisons reveal the grim prospect of a fatal contagion across Turkey’s jails.
For as long as we remember since the outbreak of coronavirus pandemic and the initial symptoms of its ever-expanding presence in Turkey, the human rights advocates have been campaigning for an inclusive amnesty scheme to avoid a disaster in Turkey’s cramped, filthy and unhealthy prison complex.
It was, as a lawmaker emphasized, an invitation to disaster when the political parties first came to hammer out the initial details of pardoning prisoners convicted of different crimes. A purged judge living in Belgium lucidly depicted the exclusion of political prisoners from the proposed (later passed) amnesty bill as a death sentence for countless inmates. They feared, for reasons based on plausible and rational grounds, that sooner or later COVID-19 might wreak havoc in Turkey’s perennially over-crowded jails.
And not long after human rights watchdogs and opposition parties unsuccessfully tried to thwart the ill-devised legislation in Parliament, the worst fears of families, whose beloved ones have been…
