Ankara-Sana
The representative of the Democratic and Progress Party in the Turkish Parliament, Mustafa Yanaroglu, announced that the authorities of Recep Tayyip Erdogan's regime subjected 605 lawyers to investigation in Turkey and sentenced 441 of them to prison terms within 6 years.
The Turkish Zaman newspaper quoted Yanaroglu, head of the party's legal and judicial policies, as saying in a statement on the occasion of the International Lawyers Day, which falls on April 5, from 2016 to 2020, the authorities arrested at least 605 lawyers and sentenced 441 of them to prison.
He added that practicing the legal profession is getting more difficult every day, as lawyers are attacked and killed while working in the corridors of the courts in addition to restricting their role and limiting it, noting that waiting hours for a single hearing has become a challenge facing workers in the profession.
He pointed out that the bar associations are being exploited by the Turkish government and that the lawyers who were self-employed in the nature of public service did not receive assistance from the state, although they were among the most affected professional groups during the Covid 19 epidemic.
Yanaroglu, a dissident from the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), reported that during the outbreak of the pandemic, many contract lawyers were dismissed as many of them had to close their offices.