The human rights balance sheet of the Gezi Park protests is appalling.  Four people were killed and 7,822 were wounded. Eleven people lost their eyesight when the capsules of gas projectiles hit their eyes. Six people are fighting for their lives in intensive care. Tens of thousands of people who participated in the protests inhaled the gas fired by the police. Thousands were detained. According to the testimonies of human right organizations and protesters, extreme police brutality was rampant during that detention.

It is not an exaggeration to say that in the last two weeks, Turkey abruptly reverted to the 1990s. Of course, a full comparison with the 1990s, when villages were set on fire and people were executed in the streets, is not possible. But a similarity exists in terms of mass violations of human rights. Turkey is once again on the radar of the international community as a country with widespread, systematic human rights violations. The warnings on human rights issued one after the other by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the European Parliament and various EU member countries and the UN Commissioner for Human Rights were the first indicators that Turkey was reverting to its 1990s status on human rights and democracy.

Human rights organizations in Turkey are interpreting the government’s reactions to the Gezi Park protests as the creeping in of a yet unnamed emergency status regime. It is known that human rights organizations, which say Turkey’s domestic legal recourses are not geared to deal with police brutality and torture, are getting ready to the take cases directly to the European Human Rights Court.

The deteriorating human rights record and the image of a police state that emerged with recent events and the government’s efforts to portray all these developments as a product of an international conspiracy against it are distinct signs of a rapid and encompassing relapse.