Up to half of all women in Turkey are subjected to ”scandalous” levels of violence, mostly from their own families, Amnesty International claimed onn Wednesday in Istanbul.
Despite the country’s eagerness to join the EU, the government and judicial authorities not only tolerated but even endorsed heinous ”crimes of honour”, the human rights group said.
Recently, the number of young girls being forced to commit suicide in the predominantly Muslim nation had increased. Some had even been taught the fundamentals of how to hang themselves with a rope and a chair, the report noted.
”The authorities rarely carry out thorough investigations into women’s complaints about violent attacks, murders or suspicious suicides,” said the watchdog’s UK director Kate Allen.
”Women must no longer be failed by Turkey’s police and Turkey’s courts.”
Underpinning the violence in the 70 million-strong country was the ”discrimination that denies women equality with men in every area of life,” Amnesty said.
Acknowledging that Turkey’s modernising government had taken the most dramatic steps yet to reform the country’s penal code, the group said it was still questionable whether the new laws would be implemented.
The code, which introduces articles of gender discrimination for the first time, is expected to be passed next month by the Turkish parliament.
”Given that the government has failed to ensure effective implementation of existing legislation, we fear that further reforms will also be resisted by the courts and other parts of the criminal justice system,” Allen added.
Listing the abuse females in Turkey are forced to endure, the report quoted a local human rights activist who said women could be attacked for as little as ”saying hello to male friends on the street”.
Ankara hopes to secure a start date for membership talks with the EU this December. In violation of EU norms, Turkish courts still commuted the sentences of rapists if they pledged to marry their victim. Citing figures from Ankara’s ministry of interior, the report said some 546 convicted rapists had received reduced sentences in 2002, after promising to wed females they had assaulted.
Although honour killings had taken place for generations, it was not until March last year that the first life sentences for such crimes were handed down by Turkish tribunals, Amnesty said.
The report highlighted the case of a man who, given a 24-year prison term for stabbing his partner, recently succeeded in having the sentence dropped to two and a half years after producing ”provocative” photographs of the woman with another man. – Guardian Unlimited Â