Organizers say gay pride march in Istanbul canceled after ban
Organisers say gay pride march in Istanbul cancelled after …
Since 1970, when the first march took place in New York, the Pride movement has spread to every continent – but still remains banned in some places
Each day brings new and disturbing accounts of story repression and human rights abuses in Turkey (Turkish journalists rally behind pro-Kurdish paper after arrests, 21 June), most recently in the arrest and detention in Istanbul on 20 June of our colleague and anti-torture campaigner, Sebnem Korur Fincanci, together with human rights activists, Erol Onderolu and Ahmet Nesin. Dr Fincanci has worked tirelessly to support survivors of torture in Turkey and internationally. She played a crucial role in the creation of the Istanbul protocol, the international standard doctors use in medico-legal reports when documenting and assessing torture, and is a member of the International Forensic Expert Group. She has written extensively on torture and medical ethics, in Turkey and elsewhere, and was involved in postmortems from mass graves in Bosnia. It is shameful that such a valiant defender of human rights has been detained since she appears to have been arrested for exercising democratic rights. She and her colleagues should be released immediately and we urge the UK government to press their case with the Turkish government as a matter of urgency.
Susan Munroe
Chief executive, Freedom from Torture
The official fiction, Brian Whitaker explains, is that gay people don’t exist in the Middle East. They do – and for many of them, the attitudes of family and society are a much bigger problem than the fear of being persecuted
