Turkish Human Rights Association (Ankara, Turkey)

Turkey is currently in the process of absorbing and internalizing a variety of broad-based legal reforms. The Criminal Code is undergoing systematic revision; many of the most authoritarian and counter-productive provisions in the 1982 Constitution (the product of a military coup in 1980) have been scrapped or amended; and to the bewilderment of many observers, a number of formally valid but heretofore unimplemented pieces of legislation have come to be applied across the country for the first time in years. Such developments follow as a result of a series of even more wide-ranging modifications in the self-consciousness of significant sectors of Turkish society.

Spending a summer with the Human Rights Association of Turkey, the most well- established organization of its kind on the domestic scene, has provided me with a unique opportunity to observe and document these developments. While I've primarily been concerned with gathering material relating to the social status of women in urban slums, I've also assisted the Association in its efforts to compile databases of human rights violations and issue joint press statements with representatives of international NGOs (Amnesty, HRW, FIDH).