ABTTF President: “We lived together in these lands for centuries, and after the borders were drawn after the wars, we were granted our status and rights as a minority in these lands. However, the state did not respect this, and gradually took away this autonomy. Indeed, we have never been accepted as the Turkish community in our own country, we have always been seen as the other, as potential enemies’’.
United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk met with Former Prime Minister of Greece and SYRIZA MP Alexis Tsipras on 18 November during his visit to Athens.
Volker Türk, who assessed the world agenda and the situation in human rights in his speech at the Department of Law, Justice and Human Rights at the University of Athens, discussed the global agenda in his meeting with Alexis Tsipras. In this meeting, Tsipras evaluated the UN’s stance on the global agenda and provided information on issues related to human rights and the rule of law in Greece, in particular the wiretapping scandal and the Pylos boat disaster off the coast of Greece, in which around 80 people trying to reach Europe lost their lives and many others were lost at sea.
“Alexis Tsipras, who is our former Prime Minister of our country and currently serving as member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) of Greece as a SYRIZA MP, should address the issues of human rights and the rule of law in our country, and I think that he should express the distortion of the understanding of human rights that deeply threatens democracy in our country. As the refugee crisis and the push backs in the country clearly show, our country has pursued a policy that lacks compassion in the field of human rights, because the state and government policy does not embrace the ‘‘other’’. We know this best. Indeed, we lived together in these lands for centuries, and after the borders were drawn after the wars, we were granted our status and rights as a minority in these lands. However, the state did not respect this, and gradually took away this autonomy. Indeed, we were never accepted as a Turkish community in our own country, we were always seen as the other, as potential enemies. Today, as we have seen most strikingly in the Bekir-Ousta and others group of cases, which can be solved as a legal issue, our freedom of association is persistently denied in three cases. While the rule of law in our country continues to be undermined in almost every field, Tsipras should be able to express this sincerely in his meeting with the Turks and wherever he takes office, including PACE, because as a politician and an elected person, he owes this to the democracy of our country and to us”, said Halit Habip Oğlu, President of the Federation of Western Thrace Turks in Europe (ABTTF).
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