If human rights violations occurred in a simplistic, singular and linear manner, it would be easy to successfully counter using simple logic and traditional methods, but it is not. On the contrary, violations continue to take place despite efforts of the human rights community, and compared to the amount of campaigning and work that has been put into eradicating human rights violations or at least reducing them, progress has not been at all satisfactory.
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The United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (“CAT”), the only internationally binding convention that aims to eradicate torture, was adopted by the UN General Assembly on December 10, 1984 and, after being ratified by the 20th State party, came into force on June 26, 1987. The Optional Protocol to the CAT (“Optional Protocol”), which establishes an international inspection system for places of detention, was thereafter adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 18, 2002 and came into force on June 22, 2006.
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Legal amendments made within the framework of the EU Adjustment Laws and the government’s declaration of “zero tolerance for torture” have led over the past few years to a relative decline of torture and ill-treatment practices, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Along with a decline in the frequency of torture incidents, a substitution took place in the methods employed. While the use of heavy torture methods such as electro-shocks, beating on the soles of the feet (falaka), reverse hanging (Palestinian hanging) or rape have diminished, methods such as beating, threatening, insulting, stripping and drenching in water began to be widely used. Although torture and ill-treatment were less frequently encountered in detention facilities, use of excessive violence by the security forces began to become prevalent at public demonstrations for freedom of speech. Despite the fall in the number of heavy torture and ill-treatment cases, perpetrators’ apparent impunity remains unaltered; the ratio of criminal convictions meted out in torture suits have remained, as it has always been, well below the ratio of those ordered in general criminal lawsuits. Most of the cases have resulted in acquittals or became statute-barred, while in cases that resulted in sentences, convictions were made for ill-treatment rather than torture and, as a common practice, prison sentences were converted into pecuniary fines and then suspended.
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For a public unfamiliar with the antecedents of mapping work, the first response to the news that two NGOs, Helsinki Citizens Assembly (hCa) and Human Rights Agenda Association (HRAA), were working on the mapping of human rights violations, and preparing a map on torture in particular, was an expectation that this would look like the geographical maps we are acquainted with from school books. They imagined that such a map would identify rights violations within a specific physical environment, to arrive at quantitative information on these violations and to register this information on a graphic representation of the area in question. There was not really anything that surprising about the expectation itself. This was the immediate understanding of the term “map” and we could not explain what it was exactly that we set out to do without first making a ten-minute prelude, even for those people closest to us. Cartography has in fact in recent years developed to an extent that destroys our old school conceptions. Mapping has become an instrument whose utilization has spread rapidly among, but is not limited to, different oppositional movements. The possibility to simultaneously take in a broad area and to communicate the knowledge attained through impressive visual solutions has made this approach attractive. While it certainly would not be correct to consider each and every study to be of equal weight and worth, our project largely started out with a similar logic. The object of study was broken down into its actors and the relationships between these actors were represented. While the criteria for such representation differed, the point of departure in each case was these relationships themselves.
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In the fourth century BC, the Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu said that good strategy is based on three sources of knowledge: Know your adversary. Know yourself. Know the terrain. It is relatively easy to understand what he means by knowledge about the adversary. We perhaps do less than we should, as we analyze ourselves and our allies, to understand our respective capabilities to act. But how does one understand the terrain, when the battle is not fought on a particular geographic field, but rather in complex social structures?
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In recent years, it has been often emphasized that torture in Turkey has decreased, at least in frequency, largely as result of legal reforms introduced in the European Union process and also as a result of struggles in the field of human rights. Debates revolving around this issue have confirmed the importance of a necessary political will to ensure the success of steps in discarding torture as a systematic practice in Turkey.
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