JINHA

ISTANBUL – The Human Rights Association (İHD) in Istanbul called, in their 165th "F sit-in" against Turkey's high-security F-type prisons, for the release of sick prisoner Fatma Tokmak, currently facing death due to prison wardens' denial of treatment for her heart problems.

The İHD Istanbul Branch Prison Commission calls for the release of sick prisoners every week in their gathering at Galatasary Square, in Istanbul's downtown Taksim district. The demonstrators held photographs of some of the 720 chronically ill and dangerously sick prisoners in Turkey's jails, whose denial of medical treatment human rights activists say constitutes a form of torture.

Over the past few weeks, activists have been calling for the urgent release of Kurdish prisoner Fatma Tokmak, who doctors say is facing a 90% chance of death from the calcification in the valves in her heart. Turkish security forces arrested Fatma and her small child, Azad, in 1996, torturing both of them. Their only crime was being guests in a house where a house raid was conducted. Fatma signed, under torture, a statement in Turkish—a language she does not speak—and was issued a life sentence. She developed health problems related to the torture she had experienced.

İHD activist Meryem Bars read the statement Fatma sent from prison recently, calling for the right to a peaceful and dignified death for herself and the other prisoners on the point of death in Turkey's prisons.

(za/fk/cm)