Vedat Kurt, a 22-year-old man who was allegedly taken prisoner and tortured by his employers after complaining about his unpaid wages, has called on the authorities to hold to account the perpetrators, who still have not been detained, journalist Mehmet Yetim reported on Monday.
Kurt was working at an auto maintenance workshop in the southern Turkish province of Antalya when he asked for his overdue pay, following which he was locked up by four people running the workshop and mistreated for three days.
He was reportedly electrocuted, beaten and forced to eat insects for three days by the perpetrators, who also pulled out his teeth with pliers.
Following the three-day-long mistreatment, he was locked in a room for three months, at the end of which he was able to escape and report the incident at a police station.
Kurt was able to get hold of photographs of his torture taken by the employers through expert reports requested by local prosecutors.
Yet, despite the images clearly supporting Kurt’s claims, the alleged perpetrators were not detained or put under any judicial supervision after several hearings in the trial that have been held thus far, according to the reports.
The journalist said the defendants were constantly calling Kurt, threatening him and demanding that he withdraw his complaint.
The next hearing in the case is in two months.
Addressing the Justice Ministry, Kurt said “Who is going to protect the rights of a poor citizen like me? How can I put my trust in justice?”
Mahir Akkoyun, a graphic designer and prominent activist, complained of the climate of impunity surrounding such cases in the country.
“They tie up a worker asking for his wages, pull out his teeth, electrocute him, torture him for days and force him to eat insects, but they are still free because they’re bosses,” he said on social media. “You can’t even find such cruelty in 19th century England. This country is hell for workers and the poor.”
In recent years, several members of Turkey’s judiciary have been implicated in allegations of corruption, bribery and misconduct, bringing into question the quality of the country’s judges and prosecutors.
Reports in the media and on social media covering such allegations typically get immediately censored by judges working in the same justice system.
Earlier this year, a mobile phone confiscated as part of a fraud investigation revealed messages indicative of bribery involving two prosecutors, and Swiss media reports claimed that Turkish nationals have been granted political asylum in Switzerland by presenting fake arrest warrants issued by Turkish prosecutors.
Government critics and human rights groups often interpret such news as indicative of the collapse of the country’s justice system, particularly in the aftermath of a failed military coup in July 2016 to which President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government responded by launching a widespread purge that included the immediate mass removal of more than 4,000 judges and prosecutors.
Many international observers have noted that the purges had a chilling effect on the legal professionals who continued to work in the judiciary.
Erdoğan’s government has also been accused of replacing the purged judicial members with young and inexperienced judges and prosecutors who have close links to the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).
In a development that confirmed the erosion of the Turkish judiciary, Turkey was ranked 117th among 142 countries in the 2023 Rule of Law Index published by the World Justice Project (WJP) in late October, dropping one place in comparison to the previous year.
