Women, Turkey, Gül, Erdogan & the New Constitution

Hi friends,

Here i will  try to put some useful references and material that will help a synthesis about the topic evoked in former post (in French):  about women in the new Consitution to be issued in Turkey under president Gül and  Prime Minister Erdogan...


The New York Review of Books http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20707

Volume 54, Number 16 · October 25, 2007

Turkey at the Turning Point?

By Christopher de Bellaigue

Since it came to power in 2002, the AKP has passed no overtly Islamist legislation. Erdogan tried to outlaw adultery, and some AKP mayors of provincial cities briefly set up alcohol-free zones, but these schemes met with protest and were abandoned. Erdogan's education minister has been accused of Islamizing textbooks, and of packing his ministry with former employees of the Religious Affairs Directorate, but education remains, for the pupils at most state schools, a resoundingly secular experience. The AKP has not tried to limit or ban usury. Although it came to power promising satisfaction to those who chafe at the head-scarf ban, a highly controversial symbol of the secular–Islamist divide, it did not, in its first term, try to reverse this ban, and the sixty-two women it put up for election in July were all bare-headed. Moreover, over the past few years, the government has brought about what a recent report on women's rights from the European Stability Initiative, a Berlin-based think tank, called "the most radical changes to the legal status of Turkish women in 80 years."⁽¹⁾ Under these reforms, rape in marriage and sexual harassment in the workplace were made criminal offenses, and sexual crimes in general were classified as violations of the rights of the individual. They had formerly been defined as crimes against society, the family, or public morality.

(1)See the European Stability Initiative's "Sex and Power in Turkey: Feminism, Islam and the Maturing of Turkish Democracy" (Berlin and Istanbul: ESI, June 2, 2007), available at www.esiweb .org.

And major documents and reports on www.esiweb.org , summarized esp. here :

http://www.esiweb.org/index.php?lang=en&id=67&newsletter_ID=24