Turkey is in a human rights crisis, says Amnesty’s Shetty

Amnesty International’s Secretary General Salil Shetty called on the G20 countries on Saturday to stand up against the ‘democratically elected hyper-nationalist leaders’ in countries such as, Turkey, Philippines, and Hungary.

Having gone to Hamburg over the weekend to lobby the leaders of the top 20 economies of the world – which also included Turkey - as they held the G20 Summit, Shetty drew attention to the latest detention of human rights activists in Turkey and said, “he country is in a serious human rights crisis".

"It is impossible for the G20 on the one hand to say it upholds values of democracy and free speech and on the other ignore blatant violations of human rights", Shetty pressed.

Noting that Erdoğan is one of the newly emerged ‘democratically elected hyper-nationalist leaders’ in the world, Shetty stated: "We've had dictatorships before, but in the case of Turkey, (Prime Minister Viktor) Orban in Hungary or (President Rodrigo)

Duterte in the Philippines, these are legitimately elected leaders, so we are in a different space now."

"There are hyper-nationalist countries where they take measures and the domestic support increases… The global system is challenged by this: free press, rule of law, the things we've taken for granted for 50 years", he continued.

In an earlier video message released in reaction to the detention of director of Amnesty’s Turkey branch, İdil Eser, Shetty reminded Erdoğan that he was also once a subject of a human rights campaign launched by Amnesty against his detention back in 1998 – when he was the mayor of İstanbul – for having citing a poem that had been condemned and deemed as a crime by the authorities in Turkey then.

Source: https://www.birgun.net/haber-detay/af-orgutu-genel-sekreteri-turkiye-ciddi-bir-insan-haklari-krizi-icinde-169124.html