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Turkey's draft atomic cooperation agreement with Japan would allow Ankara to use sensitive technologies that have potential nuclear-weapon applications. The bilateral accord would permit the export of Japanese nuclear technology to Turkey, which has contracted with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries to build four atomic reactors in the city of Sinop. The deal includes a clause that permits Ankara to extract plutonium from spent nuclear fuel and to enrich uranium -- practices that could be used to produce either reactor fuel or bomb-grade material, the Asahi Shimbun newspaper reported. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan discussed the nuclear accord when he met with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Tokyo on Tuesday. The two men agreed to work to expedite the process for approving the $22 billion reactor-construction project, the Associated Press reported. The Japanese parliament likely will debate passage of the nuclear cooperation agreement when it reconvenes later th...

We have received this urgent appeal from the President of the Union of Journalists in Turkey. Dear colleagues, Everything is getting worse. In Istanbul, on Saturday evening, police entered Gezi Park using tear gas and water cannon against civilian people including women and children. Police also used tear gas in hotels around the area, where injured people had gone for treatment. Police do not allow the press to work freely in Taksim or other places where they attack to people. Pictures of a photo-journalist (Cem Türkel from Akşam daily) were deleted by using force in Harbiye near Taksim on Saturday night. On Sunday, police began to arrest the doctors from the hotels who treated the people there. Police also made operation in some houses to arrest the leaders of Çarşı group (fans of Beşiktaş football team who were very active at the protesting demonstrations). In Ankara, there was a funeral ceremony for Ethem Sarısülük, who was killed by a plastic bullet fired by police. Polic...

PEACE IN KURDISTAN CAMPAIGN Statement 22 February 2012 It is with dismay and outrage that once again we learn of yet another round of mass arrests in Turkey. This time the victims of this repressive police action, which has become all too commonplace in the country in recent months, are trade union activists and union officials. Read in full

The Spokesman 119 Edited by Tony Simpson Ayse Berktay has been locked up in a Turkish prison since October 2011. She and some 200 others are, periodically, before Turkey’s Tribunal with Special Powers as part of the ‘KCK trials’. KCK stands for Kurdish Communities Union, which the Turkish government has labelled a ‘terrorist’ organisation, although the actual basis for this draconian claim is not at all clear. In December 2012, many Kurds, some Turks and various others gathered at the European Parliament in Brussels to consider ‘The Kurdish Question in Turkey’. The conference was sponsored by the United European Left/Nordic Green Left (GUE/NGL) political group, with support from Greens and Socialists. It had the sub-title, ‘time to renew the dialogue and resume direct negotiations’. Notwithstanding attempts by the Turkish authorities to restrict Kurdish participation, the conference heard from many speakers of diverse backgrounds and nationalities. They included two prominent K...

PEN Turkey under investigation for ‘insulting the state’ English PEN is concerned that our sister organisation PEN Turkey is facing a preliminary criminal investigation as a result of critical comments about the ongoing prosecution of pianist and composer Fazıl Say . Six members of the PEN Turkey board ( President Tarık Günersel , Vice-President Halil İbrahim Özcan , General Secretary Sabri Kuşkonmaz , Treasurer Tülin Dursun , and board members Zeynep Oral and Mario Levi ) and poet and critic Nihat Ateş (who uploaded the content to the PEN Turkey website) were called in for questioning today by the Istanbul Public Prosecutor’s Office. In June 2012, PEN Turkey’s website carried a statement condemning the prosecution of the musician Fazil Say for religious defamation, in which the centre stated that ‘the international community has been put on alert in the face of fascist developments in Turkey’. Depending on the outcome of the investigation, PEN Turkey board members may face ...

Ayşe Berktay has written a letter from Bakırköy Prison accepting her PEN award. The letter can be read in full here .

The Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) have prepared this Bulletin , following the end of mass hunger strikes amongst predominantly Kurdish political prisoners in Turkey's prisons, on 18 November. The BDP has 36 members of the Turkish Parliament, elected mainly with the support of Turkey's substantial Kurdish minority, which exceeds 20 million people. Ayse Berktay , long time activist in the Turkish peace movement and a good friend of the Russell Foundation , writes from her prison in Istanbul, where she has been held since October 2011.

Please urge you MP to support Early Day Motion 628 on Kurdish Hunger Strikes ( http://www.parliament.uk/edm/2012-13/628 ) The most recent bulletin from the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) , which has many members amongst the strikers, can be read on the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation website.

Peace in Kurdistan Campaign OPEN LETTER TO TURKISH PRIME MINISTER TAYYIP ERDOGAN Hundreds of Kurdish prisoners are now taking part in a hunger strike which they have declared is to be indefinite. This hunger strike began on 12 September, a not insignificant date in Turkey’s political history, with 63 people, including 13 women, in seven prisons. The numbers have grown rapidly with hundreds more Kurdish political prisoners joining the action and it is reported that 600 prisoners are currently on indefinite hunger strike. The prisoners' demands appear simple and reasonable: the right to education and legal defence in their mother tongue of Kurdish; and the start of direct peace talks to resolve the outstanding conflict by peaceful, constitutional means and with the full participation of imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan. If nothing is done to meet the demands of the hunger strikers, more martyrs will be added to the Kurdish dead and it is feared that the situation could...

A shameful press trial as well for Turkey as for Europe! Doğan Özgüden , Info-Türk Chief Editor, issued the following declaration on September 9, 2012, on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the beginning of his journalistic career in Turkey : I began journalism in the Republic of Turkey at the age of 16 years in Izmir on September 9, 1952 It was the first years of the Democrat Party's power having promised a real democratization in the country. However, at that date, 184 personalities of whom many writers or artists of the country were already behind iron bars on charge of belonging to a communist organization. It was followed by the arrest of many journalists or writers whatsoever be their political opinion. A group of Turkish Army's officers overthrew the DP on May 27, 1960, by a military coup with the promise to establish a democratic regime. However they refused to release Kurdish intellectuals already in prison. Moreover, they did not delay to deport many dist...

Public meeting Mass Political Show Trials in Turkey 6.30-8.30pm Tuesday 18 September 2012 Garden Court Chambers, 57-60 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London WC2A 3LJ (nearest tube: Holborn) Chaired by Prof Bill Bowring , Birkbeck College, President of the European Association of Lawyers for Democracy and Human Rights (ELDH) and International Secretary of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers Speakers include: Margaret Owen OBE , barrister, member of the Bar Human Rights Committee Ali Has , solicitor Tony Simpson , Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation; editor of The Spokesman Barry White , NUJ representative of the European Federation of Journalists Obsessively sensitive about its image, Turkey seeks to present a modern, liberal and democratic face to the outside world, but the reality for people involved in public life inside the country is far different. Repression is the regime’s inevitable knee-jerk response to those seeking to exercise their civil rights to ...

A political purge is under way in Turkey. Since 2009, thousands of activists from the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) have been arrested in police raids and interned in extended pre-trial detention. Following elections in June 2011, the BDP currently has 36 members of the Turkish Parliament, elected mainly with the support of Turkey's substantial Kurdish minority. Now, a series of trials has begun. In the latest of these, more than 200 people are before the ‘Tribunal with Special Powers’, charged with support for, and involvement in, the Union of Kurdish Communities (KCK), which is a banned organisation. This grouping, it is alleged by the Turkish Government of Prime Minister Erdogan, acts as the 'urban branch' of the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), also banned in Turkey because of its long-term armed campaign against the Turkish state. On this pretext, the Turkish authorities continue to arrest large numbers of activists throughout the country in regular raids. In recent...

Ayse Berktay Hacimirzaoglu was one of the main animators of the World Tribunal on Iraq, which held sessions in Brussels, Tokyo and New York before concluding in Istanbul in 2005. She proposed the Tribunal in 2002, at a meeting of the European Network for Peace and Human Rights, which the Russell Foundation convened in the European Parliament in Brussels. She works as a translator, and her Turkish translation of Black Beauty has been widely acclaimed. She has been held in prison in Turkey since October 2011. An international delegation is currently in attendance at the trial of Ayse Berktay (Hacimirzaoglu) and over 200 other people in Silivri, Turkey. The trial is due to end on Friday. For further details please visit the Ayse Berktay Free Her Now Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Ayse-Berktay-Free-Her-Now/262009723913600 and www.russfound.org .

Punishing the Innocent in the Name of Justice What we * are witnessing in Silivri (near Istanbul) nowadays is simply a scar of shame on the forehead of humanity. Otherwise, philosophers, theorists, humanists, law makers, activists should work on finding new definitions for all the values we were taught in school, above all justice, because what is happening here is using the devices of law and justice to criminilize and punish the innocent, in the name of peace, justice and, of course, fighting terrorism. Early in the morning of the first day of the trial, 2 July, hundreds of people gathered in Taksim Square, the main square of Istanbul, to catch buses to Silivri where the court is held, only to find that the police were waiting for them and preventing buses from going there. The police actually did this. However, some people were luckier and managed to go, taking private cars, taxis, and so on. We were among them. After driving for more than an hour we found ourselves in front...

International delegation to attend trial of Ayse Berktay (Hacimirzaoglu) in Turkey During the past three years, the Turkish state has imprisoned some 8000 citizens under the guise of fighting terrorism. In a wave of detentions known as the “KCK operations,” it has targeted activists, academics, journalists, lawyers, students, elected officials, translators and publishers on account of their democratic activities in support of the rights demanded by Kurdish citizens in Turkey. In particular, numerous members and supporters of the BDP (Peace and Democracy Party)—which has 36 elected representatives in the Turkish Parliament—have been criminalized and imprisoned on the pretext that they are alleged members of the KCK (Union of Communities in Kurdistan), a group which the Turkish state claims to be the urban branch of an armed organization known as the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party). Professor Busra Ersanli is the best known of those who were thus imprisoned in 2011, together wi...

There is still no word of Ayse Berktay's release from prison in Turkey. Guardian online has just published this article by her friend, Ayça Çubukçu . "There is a growing disjuncture between those who promote modern-day Turkey as a democracy and those who experience Turkey as a land of arbitrary detentions, political repression and military destruction. In the past two years, the Turkish state has imprisoned thousands of its citizens under the sweeping rubric of counter-terrorism operations. The recent wave of arbitrary detentions known as the KCK operations has cast such a wide net that participation in a single protest or petition could constitute evidence of an intention to commit terrorism – if not directly, then certainly by association. Today, even relatively privileged academic colleagues in Turkey face the prospect of sharing the fate of Professor Büşra Ersanlı of Marmara University, whose detention in October 2011 as an alleged terrorist was proudly defended by the pr...

The Russell Foundation has today received an important appeal from a friend in Turkey who has requested its wide dissemination. Today, in Diyarbakir, Kurdish activists commence a sit-in as part of their long campaign for political rights (see below). Our Turkish friend also urges us all to keep a close eye on developments in Turkey. Appeal to the World Public Mothers for Peace have erected Democratic Solution Tents in all cities of the Kurdish region on 18 March 2011. Kurdish people, embracing the Democratic Solution Tents and keeping watch over them 24 hours a day have directly and most powerfully displayed the determination and the will to put an end to war. Kurdish people have declared their demand and will for peace, democracy and freedom once more in a most splendid fashion to the world in the Newroz demonstrations of 2011. Millions of Kurds holding freedom marches from Newroz fields to Democratic Solution Tents scores of kilometers away have shouted out their democratic demands f...