Turkey’s LGBT community draws hope from Harvey Milk
Turks who identify with the LGBT community face discrimination in every aspect of their lives and have no legal protection at all, but increasing awareness from the public and support mainly from the opposition parties brings hope.
This week, the Turkish Parliamentary Human Rights Research Commission’s Prisons Subcommittee released its report on three prisons in the southern province of Antalya.
The inhumane conditions faced by prisoners which the report reveals are depressing. The report says gay and transsexual inmates live in the same cells, suffer because of their sexual identities and that their ward is the only area without security cameras. The last point leaves them completely unprotected and vulnerable to anything imaginable.
Just a few days ago, gay rights groups in Turkey voiced disappointment that the legislation proposed by the government to parliament in early December under the name of “democratization package” excludes crimes based on sexual orientation. The reforms contained in this package call for jail terms from one to three years for crimes based on race, nationality, skin color, gender, disability, political views, beliefs and religion. But the legislation totally excludes crimes based on sexual orientation.
Rights of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) remain a sensitive and relatively untouched topic in Turkey, as members of the LGBT community routinely suffer abuses such as discrimination, harassment, mobbing and stigmatization. Unlike in other Muslim countries, same-sex relationships have never been criminalized in Turkey, where prostitution and sex change operations are legal. Still, both the legal and sociocultural frameworks degrade LGBT rights. Although the governing Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP) has enacted a wide series of human rights reforms, it continues to turn a blind eye to homosexuals.
