On March 2, 2021, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced a 128-page “Human Rights Action Plan” (İnsan Hakları Eylem Planı in Turkish) consisting of nine primary objectives and 50 goals based on 11 basic principles and 393 action points to improve the implementation and protection of human rights in Turkey. The plan is to be implemented over a two-year period.
The plan presented the following nine objectives:
- Stronger systematic protection of human rights
- Strengthening judicial independence and the right to a fair trial
- Judicial predictability and transparency
- Protection and promotion of freedoms of expression, association and religion
- Strengthening the right to liberty and security
- Providing guarantee of the right to integrity and to private life
- Effective protection of the right to property
- Protection of vulnerable groups and strengthening social welfare
- Increased administrative and social awareness on human rights
While the extensive nature of the action plan can provide everyone with grounds to support the primary objectives, the principles and goals are neither recently developed nor newly discovered. The basic principles of universal human rights which are the accumulation of hundreds of years of understanding were cited as the 11 principles introduced in the plan.
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