Prosecutors in Turkey attempt to shut down leading women’s rights group

Prosecutors in Turkey have sparked outrage by trying to shut down a campaign group that aims to tackle the gender-motivated killing of women.

We Stop Femicide said it received a letter telling the group to disband for security reasons.

Similar tactics have been used against other rights groups as the Turkish state increasingly clamps down on civic freedoms.

The Istanbul Public Prosecutor’s Office accused We Stop Femicide of “disintegrating the family structure by ignoring the concept of family under the guise of defending women's rights” and said it infringed criminal codes.

The group, which collects data on the number of women killed by men in Turkey, said the claims are ill-founded with no factual basis.

“We know that we will never walk alone in the face of these attacks against our just struggle. Especially our members, our friends; we call on all women, LGBT+ people and all the responsive public who support women's struggle to embrace our struggle against this annulment lawsuit filed against us” the group said,

We Stop Femicide warned it will not be silenced and said the attempt to shut it down was an assault on Turkish democracy.

The furore comes amid increasing femicides in Turkey. The group said 24 women were killed by men in Turkey last month, with 416 murdered last year.

Meanwhile, Turkey last year provoked fierce criticism after pulling out of the Istanbul Convention – a landmark pan-European convention tackling violence against women. The convention, which Turkey was the first nation to ratify, is the most comprehensive legal framework that exists to tackle violence against women and girls, covering domestic violence, rape, sexual assault, female genital mutilation, so-called honour-based violence and forced marriage.

The World Health organisation estimates 38 per cent of women in Turkey experience violence at the hands of their partner during their life, which is substantially higher than the figure of around 25 per cent in Europe.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said equality between men and women is “against nature” at a summit in Istanbul back in 2014. The world leader said: “You cannot put women and men on an equal footing. It is against nature.” In 2016, he urged women to have at least three children and argued a woman’s life was “incomplete” if she did not reproduce

“A woman who says ‘because I am working I will not be a mother’ is actually denying her feminity,” he said. “A woman who rejects motherhood, who refrains from being around the house, however successful her working life is, is deficient, is incomplete”.