Courts jail LGBTQ activists as Turkey crackdown widens

Filed 2h ago · Via Courthouse News · The Buffoon Desk

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Four Beers' Polka

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Phillip Pessar from Miami, USA · CC BY 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

Turkish courts have ordered 62 people held in custody following a weekend crackdown on the LGBTQ community, a legal rights group said, part of a broader operation that saw more than 200 people detained across 15 provinces including Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has described the LGBTQ community as a ‘deviant’ movement of ‘perverts,’ and his justice minister framed the raids as protecting children and family. Among the 13 jailed by an Ankara court were seven members of Kaos GL, five transgender people and a journalist.

More than 100 people have since been detained while protesting the crackdown, including two journalists, and police used tear gas on demonstrators in Izmir. Authorities also blocked social media accounts belonging to rights groups, media outlets and journalists covering the story.

The European Parliament's Turkey rapporteur called the arrests ‘a shocking escalation of repression’ taking the country down a dark path.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

Any government that needs 15 provinces worth of police to protect the children from a handful of activists and one journalist is telling you it has bigger worries than the children. And notice the social media accounts got shut off right about the time people started watching. A man who is sure he is in the right rarely bothers to turn out the lights first.

Source: Read the original at Courthouse News → Scored: Four Beers' Polka · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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