The chief prosecutor at Turkey’s Supreme Court of Appeals has suggested reinstatement of the death penalty for the perpetrators of women’s murders, saying that handing down aggravated life sentences is insufficient in some cases.
Top prosecutor Bekir Şahin’s remarks came during an interview broadcast by CNN Türk on Thursday.
He said courts hand down the harshest sentence, aggravated life, to the perpetrators of women’s murders but that it doesn’t deter others from committing the same crime.
“I think the punishment for those convicted [of killing a woman] should be the death penalty. The death penalty should be the punishment for some crimes. A person who stabbed a pregnant woman to death should be given the death penalty instead of an aggravated life sentence,” said Şahin.
Turkey abolished capital punishment in 2004 as a part of reforms to facilitate Turkey’s accession to the European Union, although the death penalty has not been used since 1984.
Femicides and violence against women are chronic problems in Turkey, where women are killed, raped or beaten almost every day. Many critics say the main reason behind the situation is the policies of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), which protects violent and abusive men by granting them impunity.
According to a recent report from the We Will Stop Femicide Platform (KCDP), at least 315 women were killed by men in Turkey in 2023, while 248 died under suspicious circumstances.
Şahin, however, refused to establish a link between Turkey’s withdrawal from an international treaty to combat domestic violence and the frequency of acts of violence against women.
Despite opposition from the international community and women’s rights groups, Turkey in July 2021 officially withdrew from the Istanbul Convention, which requires governments to adopt legislation prosecuting perpetrators of domestic violence and similar abuse as well as marital rape and female genital mutilation.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan claimed at the time that the treaty had been “hijacked by a group of people attempting to normalize homosexuality” which he said was “incompatible” with Turkey’s “social and family values.”
“The [withdrawal from] the Istanbul Convention has nothing to do with women’s murders. They are committed regardless of the treaty. There is sufficient punishment,” said the prosecutor in remarks that contradicted his earlier statements in the same interview about the insufficiency of an aggravated life sentence for women’s murderers.
Although Şahin said an aggravated life sentence is given to women’s murderers, it is not always the case as the offenders are given lenient sentences by courts in some cases on the grounds that the crime was “motivated by passion” or the victim’s silence is interpreted as consent.