Prisoners of the Purge

As of today, an American pastor has spent 404 days in a Turkish jail without a trial, without access to evidence against him, the subject of a vicious smear campaign from the Turkish press, and facing life in prison on fabricated charges of being a terrorist and a coup plotter. Elsewhere in Turkey, a Turkish-American NASA scientist has spent 480 days in prison, much of it in solitary confinement, on terrorism and espionage charges springing from a baseless testimony of a disgruntled relative and a bizarre compilation of circumstantial evidence, including a dollar bill seized from his parents' home. Today also marks 253 days behind bars for a veteran Turkish employee of the U. S. consulate in Adana who stands accused of terrorism for doing his job as he has for 30 years: communicating on behalf of the United States Government with local community contacts. These prisoners-Andrew Brunson, Serkan Go]lge, and Hamza Uluc, ay-are the innocent victims of Turkey's collapsing rule of law. With every passing day, the injustice of these detentions compounds itself. Just as Andrew, Serkan, and Hamza have been victims of Turkey's failing rule of law, there are literally thousands more like them behind bars today. Since imposing a state of emergency nearly 16 months ago, the Turkish Government has detained more than 60,000 people and fired or suspended upwards of 100,000 others from their jobs. The so-called Decree Laws authorizing these punitive measures do not establish any evidentiary standard for application, thereby permitting wide-scale abuse.