Can Bahadır Yüce writes on Turkey’s response to coronavirus, and calls for the release of at-risk political prisoners
While COVID-19 is indiscriminate, its impact has not been equal. The poor suffer more than the rich; the threat to the old is graver than to the young; urban communities are more vulnerable than their rural counterparts. There is one particular group, above all, who are most defenceless: the incarcerated. Prisons are coronavirus hotspots. Across the world, millions closed in them are in imminent danger. Faced with calls from human rights organisations to free sick and vulnerable inmates, countries have responded in starkly different ways. There are those, like the United States, that have largely ignored these warnings. There are those, like the Philippines, that have released prisoners en masse. And then there’s the curious case of Turkey.