Human Rights
The Torture of Huseyin Yildirim
Hüseyin Yildirim is a lawyer and a Kurd from eastern Turkey. In the fall of 1981, he was serving as defense counsel to members of the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK), many of whom had been arrested and subjected to torture by Turkey’s military junta. Yildirim himself was seized in October 1981, and was imprisoned in the Diyarbakir Military Prison from November 1981 until July 1982. He gave the following testimony to Amnesty International on November 3 and 4, 1982, in Sweden, where he now lives. According to Amnesty, a medical examination conducted on November 2, 1982, confirmed that Yildirim “shows signs of external violent injury…[which] may well have occurred as a result of the torture described by [him].”
The Hammamat Declaration
In early April 1983, a group of 35 Arab intellectuals, academicians, professionals and political activists met at the Hammamat cultural center in Tunis to discuss the crisis of human rights and democratic freedoms in the Arab world. No officials or representatives of any Arab government attended, and the gathering was not sponsored by any government or political organization.
Books on Palestine and Human Rights
Raja Shehadeh and Jonathan Kuttab, The West Bank and the Rule of Law (Geneva: International Commission of Jurists, 1980).
David H. Ott, Palestine in Perspective: Politics, Human Rights and the West Bank (London: Quartet Books, 1980).
