Eren Keskin

Eren Keskin is a lawyer and human rights defender in Turkey. She is the vice-president of the Human Rights Association (IHD) and co-founder of the Legal Aid Office Against Sexual Harassment and Rape in Custody. In a career spanning over three decades, Keskin has fought for fundamental rights and freedoms in Turkey, particularly for Kurds, women, and the LGBTI+ community, and against torture and sexual violence in detention. She has made great contributions to the development of civil society and human rights in Turkey as a founding member of both the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey (the leading organization providing rehabilitation services for torture survivors and documenting human rights violations) and the Foundation for Society and Legal Studies (a lawyers’ organization investigating human rights violations in Turkey).

Due to her work as a human rights defender, Keskin has been targeted, threatened, attacked and imprisoned numerous times. There are currently 122 criminal cases filed against her in Turkey, with sentences adding up to 17 years, two months and 20 days in prison and a monetary fine of TRY 359,912 (approx. USD 61,000).  Follow her @KeskinEren1.

Eren Keskin was profiled for ATLAS by Güley Bor, a lawyer, researcher and consultant with a focus on transitional justice, human rights and gender in Iraq and Turkey. Read more about her work at the end of the profile and follow her @BorGuley.

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What drew you to working in international law/ domestic human rights law? And what were your first steps?

In high school I was part of a leftist group. When I went to university the school was under fascist occupation. It was the time of September 12 and we suffered a lot, we weren’t even able to go to school for two years. Later on, I started thinking about issues, like how superior-subordinate relationships are very developed in the leftist movement, how it is heavily male-dominated and so on. After I finished university, during that repressive period, the Human Rights Association (IHD) was established. I started visiting the Association, and thought I could express myself better there. The human rights field appealed to me and fascinated me more than politics, and then I started working at IHD. The most important part about this struggle for me is that you can exist as an individual, you are more liberated to speak your mind. Politics are a bit different. That’s why I continued with it, and now it’s a part of my life.

Of course, you learn with time. You start getting to know the system. Because we are forced upon an official ideology since the day we are born, we are taught a false history. You try to grapple with this within the struggle. This is why the human rights struggle became so important to me. For example, I learned that I was Kurdish when I was 13 years old. I later found out about the Armenian Genocide because of a family issue (of course I didn’t know it was a genocide at the time). My uncle married an Armenian woman. My grandfather, who was also a lawyer, asked for my grandmother’s name to be changed from Josephine to Hülya and for her to convert to Islam. I couldn’t understand at the time why this was being done. After all this, and with time, I became further and further drawn to the human rights struggle.

What have been the high points of your career thus far? 

I always think that courage is what protects you the most. When you are courageous, even if they view you as an enemy, they have to respect you. This is what I saw my whole life, courage has been something that protects me. This is why, for example, winning a case or objecting to a violation in court are very important, because we usually have a culture of obedience.

The documented, most valuable moments of my career are the International Hrant Dink Award, the Orhan DoganPeace Award, and the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders. I’ve been honored with many prizes. These of course impact you positively. You think to yourself how you are always harmed here, punished, sent to prison but others are awarding you. Those awards granted in the name of people I love and value are of course very valuable.

What are some of the challenges that you faced coming up in your career?

I survived two armed assaults, one in 1996 and the other in 2001. These impacted me a lot. I received a lot of threats, especially in the 1990s. I was imprisoned for six months for using the term Kurdistan. Again, I was barred from practicing my profession for one year, for using the term Kurdistan. This concept became very determinative in my life and I never gave up, and now it’s no longer a crime, everyone can say Kurdistan. A few of us, a lot happened to us because of this but it seems at least that something came out of it. Now again I have a prison sentence of 17 years and two months but with the new judicial reform that allows appealing to the Court of Cassation, the process is prolonged.

I have been afraid and concerned individually because of all of this, but what saddens me the most has been upsetting my family. They were always sad for me, always worried. Now, for example, there’s a high chance I might be going to prison again, and what I think about the most is that I have an 86-year-old mother, I have my cats, I pay rent. These are all very mundane things in your life but they can become the most important things when something happens to you. 

If you choose this route, if you oppose the official state ideology and position your life on this, then you are never much free. You know that. But of course, it also depends on what you understand of freedom. I think that disobedience provides personal comfort. You live at peace with yourself, you say, “I’ve always been the same.” The state constantly shifts. For example during the peace process it softens, nothing happens to you - but all of a sudden, the process ends and then you become a terrorist. Through all of this, being able to say, “You keep changing, but I’m always the same” is an important comfort, in terms of respecting yourself. This is why I never thought I shouldn’t have been involved in this line of work, that I should have done something else. I always lived happily. Being at peace with yourself is the foundation of happiness and it’s important to be able to do that.

You’ve survived two armed assaults, been imprisoned for six months for using the word Kurdistan. You were targeted particularly by mainstream media during the time you acted as PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan’s lawyer. You now have 122 criminal cases against you and lastly, ten days before this interview, your house was raided due to your statements on Operation Peace Spring and a new case was launched against you. How do you maintain your motivation despite all of this? What would you like to say to defenders who work in other countries where human rights defenders are subjected to such extreme levels of oppression?

What gives me strength the most is our debt to our dead. So many people I love are now gone, those who led this struggle. Musa Anter, Vedat Aydın, Leman Fırtına, Emil Galip Sandalcı… We lost so many of our people in this fight. And I’m still alive, we are still alive. We owe them. We need to continue their struggle. And I must say that I never thought to give up.

You need to see this as a way of life, to internalize it. If so, everything appears normal to you. Foreign committees visit us, ask me how I live like this, if I don’t think about living abroad, if I’m not afraid. After a while you learn to live with that fear, it becomes part of your life. If you love what you do, you don’t find it bizarre. I sometimes think the process is now a bit more relaxed with the judicial reform, but I have a prison sentence of 17 years and two months against me. It could be finalized tomorrow. But I continue living normally. Because if we don’t do that, living is no longer possible; you’d have to live in constant fear. I think the state already succeeded in doing this. It scared people so much with its official ideology and authoritarian militarist identity that everyone lives in fear. No one really owns their life. But I own mine. This is very important to me. I’ll go to prison if the sentence is finalized, I’ll take that risk. I think it’s easier living like this. It doesn’t affect you as much.

You are a founder of the Legal Aid Office Against Sexual Harassment and Rape in Custody. In another interview of yours, I read that when you first established the Office, you faced backlash that “Torture is torture, what does sexual harassment even mean?” What type of challenges did you face in integrating a gender lens to the human rights struggle?

I decided to establish this Office while in prison. Before that, I was representing clients in political cases, mostly Kurdish political cases. We knew that all women were subjected to sexual torture, but no one said it out loud. Electrocution, strappado, beatings...  these were mentioned but no one said they were subjected to verbal harassment or rape. One day, while I was pacing in prison, one of the girls I used to represent came to me and said, “Do you know what I went through while in detention?” I said of course, we already filed a criminal complaint. All of a sudden, she started crying, said “Do you know about the rape as well?”, and fainted. 

After that, we started discussing this with each other. All women were being questioned naked at the time. Men were also being questioned naked, but women were especially being questioned naked by many male officers in order to subordinate them. Their bodies were being touched, they were verbally harassed and even raped. After I was out of prison I was thinking what we could do about it. Jutta Hermans, a German lawyer friend, was here to prepare a report on pressure against lawyers in Kurdistan. I told her and she suggested we establish an office. This crime was left unpunished and we had to increase awareness among women to seek legal remedy. Heidi Wedel, a friend of ours from Amnesty International, supported us and we launched the office. 

First we decided to visit the prisons. At that time, prisoners were kept in wards, rather than individual cells,so we could meet with leaders of organizations. We spoke to all of them and said women are being subjected to sexual torture, please ask your friends to apply to us. Many leftist organizations replied: “We are revolutionaries, what do you mean with sexual torture? These are bourgeois concepts.” Ridiculous things like that. There was MED TV at that time. We made a few programs there, because we were going to Kurdistan a lot for every violation. Women would always pull us over and tell us that men, that soldiers were doing awful things to them. We knew what those things were. We would ask them to file a criminal complaint. But they would say it would be worse if their husbands or fathers heard. So they were silenced again because they feared men. We spoke about this at MED TV. We explained that this was a tactic of war, and asked them to apply to us. And then we started receiving the first applications from Kurdish women. Later, this issue started being discussed, and Kurdish organizations even established commissions to work on it. I still think it’s insufficient but we’ve come a long way. We’ve been working since 1997. Now our office is an application center. Everyone calls us first when something happens.

This is a fact: We are facing a terrible state, a state founded upon genocidal ideology. It’s very difficult to change it, and to do that, you first need to generate the correct demands. But I think the problem is that we lack an opposition that generates that correct demands, because even the organizations we establish ourselves resemble the state. The leftist, socialist, Kurdish organizations that we establish in opposition, structures that refer to themselves as liberal, they are all similar to the state. They are all male-dominated and militaristic. The oppositional structure is heavily shaped by the official ideology, that unionist mentality shaped both the right and the left. I think this is our main problem, it stems from us. If we are able to surpass that, I think we can resort to the state with the correct demands. This gendered perspective should be discussed in every institution. My suggestion is that every organization, every political party should discuss gender. Even this isn’t being done enough.

Do you have any advice for people, particularly women, hoping to work in international law/ domestic human rights law in the future?

 Above all, to be courageous. You face so many obstacles. Even the men you think closest to you can obstruct you, this can be your father, your brother, your husband. I think we need to be very brave. The first step is to be brave, and the second to be self-confident. Self-confidence builds in time. You need to take some risks, because only you can build self-confidence! Men will never present you that. You will create it yourself.

Of course, you can work in mixed organizations. I work at them as well, but we must establish independent women’s organizations. Conscientious objectors, feminists and members of the LGBTI+ community- these are the groups that should lead the work. They are the ones to break the militaristic, male-dominated feudal structure. 

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Eren Keskin was profiled for ATLAS by Güley Bor, a lawyer, researcher and consultant with a focus on transitional justice, human rights and gender in Iraq and Turkey. She previously supported efforts to collect evidence of the 2014 Yazidi Genocide as Manager of the Genocide Documentation Project of Yazda in Duhok, Kurdistan Region of Iraq and authored Yazda’s second mass graves report. She was Principal Investigator on the research project, ‘Reforming Legal Responses to Conflict-Related Sexual Violence in Iraq and the Kurdistan Region’, as part of the Conflict Research Programme–Iraq at the LSE Middle East Centre, which resulted in the publication ‘Response to and Reparations for Conflict-Related Sexual Violence in Iraq: The Case of Shiʿa Turkmen Survivors in Tel Afar’. She is currently Principal Investigator on the research project, ‘Collective Symbolic Reparations for the Yazidi Genocide’ under the University of Duhok, and continues to consult with international organizations and NGOs, particularly on issues related to transitional justice and reparations. Follow her @BorGuley