After a spectacular parade of more than one hundred thousand people in Istanbul, in 2014, the Turkish authorities prohibited the rally, year after year, invoking security reasons.
Le Monde
The Turkish police pursue their attempts to bully against LGBT + people (lesbians, gays, bisexual, transgender, etc.). Shortly before the start of the pride march, in Istanbul, the rose police carried out, Sunday, June 26, a muscular descent in several bars in the Cihangir district, around Taksim, and arrested “at random” the people who found it. The NGO Kaos GL, which militates for the promotion and protection of LGBT +people, has counted “52 arrests”, reported Amnesty International, which claimed their “unconditional and immediate liberation”. According to several witnesses, the police tried to prevent the press from filming the arrests.
Bülent Kiliç, experienced and award-winning photographer from the France-Presse agency, accustomed to conflict zones, was handcuffed in the back, saw his t-shirt torn off and was embarked with others on board A police van. He had already been arrested in 2021 in the same circumstances. 2>
prohibited march
The march of the pride Stambouliote, the first edition of which took place in 2003, was officially prohibited, since 2015, by the city governor, officially “for security reasons”, after a spectacular parade in 2014 of More than one hundred thousand people in Istanbul.
This year again, hundreds of demonstrators have braved this ban, brandishing rainbow flags in the streets adjacent to the famous Taksim square, entirely closed to the public. By singing “the future is queer”, “you will never be alone”, or “we are here, we are queer, we will not disappear”, the demonstrators then paraded for a little more than an hour in the streets from the Cihangir district, supported by residents posted at the windows.
stigma
Friday, the European Commissioner of Human Rights, Dunja Mijatovic, called “the authorities of Istanbul to lift the prohibition in force on the march of pride and to guarantee the security of peaceful demonstrators”. “The human rights of LGBT people in Turkey must be protected,” she added, claiming that it is “ended [their] stigmatization”.
Homosexuality, decriminalized in Turkey since the middle of the 19th e century (1858), is not prohibited, but it remains largely subject to social stigma and the hostility of the hostility Islamo-conservative party in power, the AKP, as well as that of the president’s government, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. A minister had, in the past, the homosexuals of “Détracées”.