In April 1991 the Turkish parliament enacted the Anti-Terror-Law (ATL), which required that: The sentences of those convicted under the provisions of this law will be served in special penal institutions built on a system of cells constructed for one or three people...
[5] On invitation of the Turkish Government, the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) visited the prison in Eskişehir in August 1996.
[8] The compromise Justice Minister Hikmet Sami Türk offered on 9 December 2000 was not sufficient for the prisoners, so negotiations conducted by well-known personalities including Orhan Pamuk, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, failed.
[10] On 3 January 2001 the Justice Minister announced that 1,118 inmates and detainees from 41 prisons were on indefinite hunger strikes, while 395 were on death fasts.
In May 2002 Hüsnü Öndül, chair of the HRA, called on the Justice Minister to enter an intensified dialogue and appealed to the prisoners to end the senseless deaths.
At the end of the year Bülent Arınç, at that time chair of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, met with Aşçı's relatives and representatives of non-governmental organizations.
He said that the house representing the nation could not remain insensitive on a subject for which a lawyer was willing to risk his life, and indicated that the Ministry of Justice and the government would act.
[12] After reading Decree 45/1 of the Ministry of Justice, dated 22 January 2007, Behiç Aşçı and two prisoners who were still fasting declared that they would stop.
In its 2006 Annual Report, the HRFT presented the following figures on deaths during the fast: One group protested by setting themselves on fire in Germany.
Unfortunately it is very clear from the information gathered in December 2005 that the situation in this regard remains highly unsatisfactory.In the same report the CPT drew special attention to people sentenced to aggravated life imprisonment who, according to Article 25 of Law 5275, must be held in individual cells.
Their only out-of-cell activity, apart from a visit every 15 days and a fortnightly telephone call, was outdoor exercise in the courtyard adjoining their cell.
The application of an isolation-type regime is a step that can have very harmful consequences for the prisoner concerned and can, in certain circumstances, lead to inhuman and degrading treatment.
Beyond this, the CPT considers that the very philosophy underlying Article 25 of the Law on Execution of Sentences should be reconsidered.In December 2007 and January 2008 the Association of Contemporary Jurist (Çağdaş Hukukçular Derneği or ÇHD) conducted research on the implementation of Decree 45/1.
[21] Amnesty International (AI) has issued several reports raising concerns of isolation and atrocities in F-type prisons.
Answering a parliamentarian's request, Justice Minister Sadullah Ergin stated in August 2009 that the reconstruction of the prison to a closed high security institution for the execution of sentences had been finished.