Excerpt:
…[A] group of Turkish and Armenians historians and social scientists gathered around a table in the Armenian capital Yerevan last month to hold an academic discussion about ways to reach mutual understanding. The academics were brought together by the Institute for International Cooperation of the German Adult Education Association, or DVV International, the main aim [...]
More recent UPDATE: Court rejects retrial of the molester. (click here)
UPDATE on the incident described below: Female deputies of the ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, submitted a proposal yesterday to double penalties for sexual assault, just days after the release of a columnist accused of abusing a 14-year-old girl. (click here)
ORIGINAL POST: Below [...]
Finally, a court in Egypt acts against the plague of fe4male harrassment in Egypt (see my previous blogs on this). Click here for full article. Excerpt:
Noha al-Ostaz, a 27-year-old Egyptian filmmaker, was standing on the side of a busy, traffic-choked Cairo street last June when a van driver reached out of his window and groped [...]
The fifth session of the trial of 86 suspects on charges of involvement in Ergenekon, a criminal network accused of plotting to overthrow the government, will be held today. The session will be spent reading of the massive indictment, which is expected to take at least another three weeks…
Since some of the suspects’ lawyers demanded [...]
[A recent] report, titled “Investing in Turkey’s Future Generations: Transition from School to Job and Turkey’s Development,” prepared by the Human Development Dialogue, operating in Turkey under the supervision of the World Bank, shows that 40 percent of Turkey’s youth are neither economically active nor in education. Another 40 percent are in education, while only [...]
Turkey needs an urban, secular and liberal political movement that can successfully utilize the inherent potential of society to complete the modernization process while addressing the Kurdish and secularist-anti-secularist clash, according to Dutch historian and Turkey expert Erik Jan Zürcher.
Speaking to Hürriyet daily, Zürcher said while the ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, exemplified [...]
Transportation Minister Binali Yildirim has said the government is looking into ways to block unwanted pages of Web sites instead of banning the site as a whole….
Binali’s remarks came in the aftermath of harsh criticism from Turkish Internet users following the banning of popular blog-hosting services blogspot.com and blogger.com. Access to these sites was suspended [...]
See this site for a legal discussion by one of TUrkey’s most renowned Constitutional scholars of the Turkish Constitutional Court’s recently published justification for its decision on June 5, 2008 to cancel law #5735, which would have amended several articles of the Constitution and allowed female students to attend university while wearing headscarves….
(click here for [...]
The latest in a series of bans on popular Web sites has spurred many to question the future of Internet freedom in Turkey. Turkish Internet users trying to access the popular [and world's largest] blog-hosting service blogspot.com get an error message saying that access to the site has been blocked by a court decision, without stating [...]
“Human Rights in the Era of the AKP” by Howard Eissenstat (click here for full text):
…Turkey’s stance on basic human rights is complex. On the one hand, Turkey is a functioning parliamentary democracy with regular, free, fair elections in a region where this is still a rarity. Despite important limitations, the Turkish press is both [...]