Foreigner in Prison Theme has the goal of informing the public and reporting about the rights and obligations of immigrants, temporary protected and stateless prisoners with any kind of documentation or undocumented prisoners all the while announcing and finding a solution to the problems centered upon these particular prisoner group. This working field encompasses everyone who is in Turkish prisons and not a Turkish citizen.
The rise in the number of foreign prisoners in Turkey, due to the high volume of immigration in recent years, created new needs. According to the data of November of 2018, there are 7897 foreign prisoners and 3102 of these are Syrians. Foreign prisoners have problems in regards to access to justice and healthcare due to the lack of translators and they get obstructed when they want to write or read letters in their native language all the while they also have difficulties in accessing visual or audio publications in their native language. For most of the prisoners, it’s impossible for their families to go to a prison situated in a city they do not know in Turkey and go to the prison for a visit at most for an hour.
Civil Society in Penal System Association(CİSST), prepared books for the foreign prisoners in five different languages that are most spoken in prisoners to enable them to access their rights. The effort to transmit these books, which are in Persian, Kurdish, Arabic, Dari and English for now, to prisoners and their relatives continue.
CİSST constituted a platform named Foreigners in Prison Network with a goal to announce and solve the right violations experienced by foreign prisoners.
26.03.2019