HUMAN RIGHTS AGENDA

She is among those who stand in front of, among those who resist, in the midst of an attack that forces children and 80-year-old people to work, leaves young people alone towards a pitch-black future, pushes women either to their homes or to unregistered jobs, and in short, workers' rights are being scythed day by day. Neslihan Acar, 38, is the cahirperson of DGD-SEN, the independent union representing warehouse, port, shipyard and maritime workers. When we add the other strikes, vigils and protests that have sprouted under the umbrella of other unions affiliated to UMUT-SEN, 24 hours of her life are filled with this struggle.

As soon as the government's debate on “euthanasia” of stray animals, an irrational concept for this issue, became law and was published in the Official Gazette, news of massacres started coming from all over Turkey. The images of dogs and cats tortured to death are blood-curdling. Even more frightening is the social consent behind these scenes and what they may lead to over time. We talked about the subject with psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Specialist Dr. Didem Aksüt, because we need it.

A sad balance sheet: According to the data compiled by the Health and Safety Labour Watch * from the events it has access to, at least 42 child workers lost their lives in the first seven months of 2024. It is known that at least nine of the dead children were working within the scope of the MESEM program. ** Amendments to the Vocational Education Law in 2016 and 2021 paved the way for children to be used as cheap labor with a one-day "training" a week that remains on paper. Workerized children die while working and live a life without workers' rights, subjected to intense violence and physically and mentally injured. We discussed the issue with Ezgi Koman, who has been working in the field of child rights for years and is part of a program focusing on MESEMs at the FISA (Fikir ve Sanat Atölyesi) Child Rights Center.

As we left the July 8-14 Nonbinary Awareness Week behind, we talked to Şükrü and Ceylin from Demir Leblebi about the difficulties LGBTIQ+s face in education and housing from a queer perspective

The report, which is the result of an eight-day field research in the Büyük Menderes Basin, goes deeper by focusing on a specific region, but it does not stop there. It also has a perspective that reaches from this river to the seas of the world; for example, it draws a pattern of environmental destruction with lines drawn from a village in Aydın to the global scale. Scientific data strengthens the report, but the report transforms the narrative into a “story” without drowning the reader in data, sometimes like a diary, sometimes with notches from literature and psychology.

During June, we witnessed Pride Marches in many parts of the world, some of them could be held and some of them couldn’t be done. These marches contain numerous stories and experiences. The story of LGBTQ+ people who had to become immigrants comes to mind. Lia, from the GALAS LGBTQ+ Community established in Los Angeles, talked about the difficulties faced by queer Armenians in addition to being queer as an immigrant.

This is not a classic family history search story. Uskan investigates her grandmother, who passed away when Uskan was 16, and whose Armenian identity she knew nothing about because grandmother kept it a secret, and of course her mother Maria, in her village, through official documents and possible church records. This is a search that considers it natural not to find anything because it Uskan aware of what has happened. She wanders through the narrow streets of Adana, the dilapidated corridors of the Apkarian School, and the wild nature of the countryside, turning the camera into a hand that touches the present.

We will get to the data, but what we will eventually reach is thought-provoking. The HRFT (Human Rights Foundation of Turkey) describes this process as "a progression from a state practice that systematically rights violations to the total abandonment of the idea of a rights-based regime". Universal law, of which Turkey is a part, fails to deter perpetrators. An equally important result is that these violations of rights take place in front of the eyes of the wider society and become normalized. In fact, places of torture have gone beyond the boundaries of four walls and spread to peaceful demonstrations expressing the demands for the most basic democratic rights and freedom of expression.

44-year-old Nejla Işık was one of those women who stood guard without caring about gas, water and batons. She witnessed the transformation of this geography, which she was born in and which she doted on, into a "hellhole", and she cut olive trees with her hands, crying, so that they would not be buried under the ground. She has always been at the forefront of the resistance, together with the older generation of her family in their 80s and her two children in their 20s. In the March 31 local elections, Işık was elected as the mukhtar of İkizköy and a new phase of her life began. Apart from its significance for the Akbelen Resistance, this new phase also contains the story of a woman transformed around the environmental movement.

A series of events were organized as part of the 1000th week of Saturday Mothers' gathering in Galatasaray Square. One of them was the screening of a movie directed by Zelal Buldan, who was born on the day her father Savaş Buldan was killed. In the film 'About My Father: Catharsis', the director deals with her father, the silence that prevails at home due to her father's grief, and the search for ways to talk about the unspoken with her mother Pervin Buldan.