Human rights activist and deputy from the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) Ömer Faruk Gergerlioğlu said on web TV on Saturday that water is deliberately cut off in an unnamed Turkish prison, according to a guard who spoke secretly to him.
Speaking about the dire conditions in Turkey’s overcrowded prisons, Gergerlioğlu said a guard in a prison in a hot-weather province told him that their supervisors order them to cut the water despite the nonexistence of problems with the water supply. He did not specify the city to protect the identity of the guard.
Gergerlioğlu also said inmates have been sleeping in front of toilets due to excessive crowding in Turkey’s prisons over the last couple of years.
Turkey has jailed tens of thousands of people from all walks of life since a failed coup in July 2016 on charges of terrorist links and coup involvement. Long pretrial detentions are common.
Gergerlioğlu, a medical doctor who was purged from his job, brings up human rights violations that have been taking place in Turkey’s post-coup crackdown targeting dissidents.
During the same show he said that due to long pretrial detentions, small children had begun to forget their imprisoned parents and that many draw prison pictures in their first sketches.