The Human Rights Association (IHD) has criticized the use of police violence against the children who participate in the activities to protest the bad treatment against Abdullah Öcalan, imprisoned leader of the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK).

The association sent letters to the President, the members of the government, the Parliamentary Commission for the Human Rights and Prime Ministry’s Human Rights Presidency, demanding an end to the use of violence against children and the punishment of those responsible for it. 

“On the other hand, we want justice for those children arrested at the age for elementary education: 22 in Diyarbakır and 24 in Adana provinces.

Getting arrested for “being a member of a terrorist organization”

IHD’s Regional Representative Mihdi Perinçek announced that 408 were taken into custody, of those 120 were arrested and the 24 of those arrested were children.

According to Perinçek, “95 percent of those taken into custody were subjected to beating and torture. The children got their share, too. Arresting children is simply unacceptable.”

The IHD states that the sixteen of those children arrested were at the age for elementary education.

Cihan İpek, a lawyer from the Diyarbakır Bar, representing five of the children arrested, said, “The prosecutor sent the children to the court for the charge of opposing the Law on Demonstration and the court added the charge of membership in a terrorist organization and doing propaganda work for such an organization, arresting them at the end.”

Police violence

A picture taken by the Democratic Society Party (DTP) at its Mersin activity on October 18 shows a police officer forcing two children to throw rocks at the activists.

According to the report by daily Radikal, the gas bomb used by the police during a DTP activity in the city of Van injured a twelve year old child.

In the city of Siirt, a child’s head and ankle were injured. On October 21, in the city of Nusaybin, eighteen year old Mehmet Tunç was subjected to violence in a police vehicle and then left at a park. (EÜ/TB)