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➪ Police blocked a planned protest in Istanbul’s Kadıköy against the 11th Judicial Package, which seeks to criminalize LGBTQ+ identities, restrict gender-affirming surgeries, and penalize related content. Two people were detained. In response, feminist and LGBTQ+ activists unfurled banners on a ferry and chanted:
“State, get your hands off my body!”
“Jin, jiyan, azadi!” (‘Women, life, freedom’ in Kurdish)
➪ Police violence erupted during the protest in Ankara, as well. Officers choked journalist İbrahim Türk, tortured and detained a LGBTQ+ activist, and broke another activist’s finger. Despite the crackdown, women and LGBTQ+ individuals broke through police barricades, and the march went on.
➪ Activists took to the streets in 16 cities — including Istanbul, Ankara, Antalya, Bursa, Dersim, Bodrum, Fethiye, Adana, Antakya, Didim, Mersin, Datça, Kuşadası, Kocaeli, Elazığ, Aydın, and Malatya — to protest the bill targeting women and LGBTQ+ rights.
➪ At Ankara’s Hacettepe University, ultranationalist fascists armed with machetes and other sharp objects attacked students who had been protesting for days for healthy nutrition and against the 11th Judicial Package. While none of the attackers were detained, students who tried to visit their injured friends in the hospital were subjected to police violence and taken into custody. It later emerged that the masked assailants, whose identities were exposed, had participated in other on-campus attacks and were protected by both the university administration and its security forces.
➪ In 2022, former HDP MP Hüda Kaya was sentenced to one year and six months in prison for “carrying a phone in her bag” during a visit to her son at Çanakkale Prison — a visit she made in her official capacity as a member of parliament.
➪ On October 25, theatre practitioner and academic Eda Saraç was on her way to perform in Harbiye when she got caught in the security barriers set up for an event attended by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan at Lütfi Kırdar. Upon resisting the police officers who refused to let her pass, she was handcuffed, beaten, and taken into custody. Held overnight, she was later referred to the prosecutor’s office on charges of “insulting the president.” On October 27, Istanbul Courthouse in Çağlayan accepted the prosecutor’s request, and she was formally arrested.
Pic by Fatoş Erdoğan
➪ On November 25 last year, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, 168 women and LGBTQ+ individuals were subjected to police violence in Istanbul. A year later, just before the same date, they were charged with “participating in an illegal demonstration,” while four others also faced charges of “resisting the police.”
➪ Fatma Şanverdi, a 17-year-old child laborer, was among 15 workers injured when a bus carrying employees from a packaging facility at the vegetable market in Hatay’s Reyhanlı district collided with a tractor one evening. She died in the hospital after a week of treatment.
According to the Workers’ Health and Safety Council, five child workers died in workplace accidents in October alone.
➪ Private security units attacked LGBTQ+ and female students at Ankara University’s Faculty of Language, History and Geography (DTCF) who were protesting to demand clarification of the suspicious death of Rojin Kabaiş.
➪ Twenty-nine figures, including politicians, journalists, academics, and civil society representatives from Turkey and abroad, issued a message of solidarity with Osman Kavala on the eighth anniversary of his imprisonment. Among them was Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, who said:
“It has been eight years since Osman Kavala was imprisoned. The boundless injustice and oppression he has endured — and that we have been forced to merely witness — make us feel that his captivity is, in a way, our own.”
➪ Three people who participated in a Halloween event in Eskişehir carrying a cross made of empty beer crates were detained on charges of “inciting public hatred and hostility” and “insulting the public.”
Compiled by Bawer
Translated by Mercan Baş
Cover photo by Larry Johnson
