Turkey Purge

A huge cleansing of Turkey’s state and other institutions is continuing as people from all walks of life find themselves being hunted down and taken into custody. At least 111 people were arrested, while 180 others were detained over the past 48 hours, according to Turkish news agencies. Police carried out the operations in at least […]

Turkey’s Interior Ministry has appointed trustees to the Van, Mardin and Siirt municipalities in Turkey’s east and southeast region, replacing democratically-elected pro-Kurdish mayors with government-appointed figures. In a statement on Thursday morning, the Interior Ministry announced that Mardin mayor Ahmet Türk, Van mayor Bekir Kaya, who was detained in the early hours of Thursday, and

Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) government has so far appointed trustees to 34 of 106 municipalities run by mayors from the pro-Kurdish Democratic Regions Party (DBP), according to a report by the Doğan news agency on Thursday. In the local elections of 2014, DBP candidates won mayoral posts in 11 provincial municipalities. Trustees have

Turkey’s top judicial body, the Supreme Council of Judges and Prosecutors (HSYK), has dismissed 203 more judges and prosecutors over alleged ties to the faith-based Gülen movement, which is accused by the government of masterminding a failed coup attempt on July 15. The decision for the expulsion of the 203 judges and prosecutors was made

Fundamental rights are suspended; political opponents, intellectuals are jailed; media is censored. Same old same old in Turkey. The pervasive sense of fear, apprehension and the threat to fundamental rights including the right to life in the emergency rule under the Recep Tayyip Erdoğan regime are far higher than that. Yet there are still a few

According to a report in Deutsche Welle (DW) on Tuesday, most of the 60 Turkish diplomatic passport holders who are seeking asylum in Germany in the post coup period are military personnel who were representing Turkey at NATO. Given the fact that the military personnel at NATO have classified information regarding Turkey, which is a