Inmates, a fortiori when they are incarcerated for political reasons, do not benefit from any leniency, even when their state of health, physical or mental, deteriorates. Like Aysel Tugluk, an ex-deputy of a pro-Kurdish party with dementia.
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Incarcerated for five years at Kandira High Security Prison in Kocaeli in the province of Marmara (northwestern Turkey), the Aysel Tugluu inmate is sinking into madness. Holes of memories, difficulties of movement and speech hinder the autonomy of this former member of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP, left pro-Kurdish), undermined by a form of early dementia.
Pervin Buldan, the co-chair of the HDP, moved from it after went to see it on December 24, 2021. “Aysel is no longer able to take up.” While his state empires, justice refuses to overlooking the execution of his sentence for appropriate medical treatment. The provisional release requests filed by his lawyers have all been rejected.
Judges are not in a hurry to soften the fate of the politician, sentenced to more than ten years in prison in 2020 for “belonging to a terrorist group”, namely the Kurdistan workers’ Party (PKK, armed rebellion Kurdish), the Juror’s enemy of the Turkish state for nearly forty years. Everything that AHel did is write, talk and pronounce the word “Kurdistan”, at a time when many did it, knowing that a peace process was ongoing between the Islamic-Conservative government and the PKK.
In 2015, the armed struggle resumed over. A year later, the failed coup of July 15, 2016 served as a pretext for the triggering of purges that put civil society senses below. Like tens of thousands of opponents, the member of the HDP ended up behind the bars.
The highest incarceration rate in Europe
According to his relatives, his mental health deteriorated in 2017, the year of his mother’s death. The penitentiary administration then authorizes it to attend the burial, planned in Ankara. But when it and his own are at the cemetery, a band of fanatical nationalists agresses, chanting racist slogans, profaning the grave on the pretext that the family is alevie (a heterodox branch of Islam) and presumed close to the pkk, so enemy of the nation. The attack is so violent that the family must leave the places with the remains and find another burial, further, in the southeast of the country.
From this trauma, Aysel never went back. His dementia was diagnosed, almost one year ago, by the Department of Legal Medicine of the University of Kocaeli, which recommends a hospital care. But the Institute of Legal Medicine, affiliated with the Department of Justice, is not of this opinion. The sentence “can continue in prison with regular treatment and medical controls,” concludes the institution in his counter-expertise.
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