Brussels alarmed by Turkish police violence

Transgendered people have a rough time in Turkey (Photo: RAFIK BERLIN)

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS – Five Turkish transgendered people are set to go on trial on Thursday (21 October) on charges of resisting police and may face of up to three years in prison, in a case which could negatively impact the EU's yearly assessment of Turkey's progress toward accession.

According to the Ankara-based transgender rights group Pembe Hayat (Pink Life), police stopped the five in May, accused them of being prostitutes, pulled them out of their car by the hair, beat them with batons and sprayed them with tear gas.

Five international NGOs, including the New-York-based Human Rights Watch and the Brussels-situated ILGA-Europe, in a joint letter this week called on the Turkish authorities to drop the charges and to hold the police officers accountable.

They said that about a dozen transgendered people, most of them prostitutes, have been attacked and killed in Turkey over the past few years.

"The case of the five transgender persons who will stand trial later this week for resisting the police is well known to us and we have made our concerns known to our Turkish counterparts," Angela Filote, the spokeswoman for EU enlargement commissioner Stefan Fuele told this website.

http://euobserver.com/9/31072