Turkish government’s antidemocratic pressures on the HDP’s Youth Assembly increase

The AKP-MHP government continues with its policies of oppression and intimidation in all areas. One of the social groups most exposed to such policies is the youth.

The police have recently detained twenty-three members of the HDP Youth Assembly in Adana after house raids. Apartment doors were broken during the raids and the youth were subjected to police violence during detention. This repressive step came right after the declaration of the HDP Youth Assembly on 11 June 2019. Previously, the youth representative at the Central Executive Board of the HDP was arrested and then released in April 2019 after 6-month imprisonment. Also, the youth assembly’s member responsible for foreign affairs was arrested about a year ago and he is still under pre-trial detention. 

The HDP’s youth assembly, an autonomous decision-making body within the HDP, has been a constant target of the government’s policies of intimidation and criminalization from the very outset of the foundation of youth assemblies. Like all authoritarian governments, the AKP-MHP government is particularly suspicious of and hostile to the organized power of the youth, the HDP’s youth assemblies in particular, who struggle for a democratic, peaceful and fair future. We view the incessant attacks on the youth as assaults on the democratic future of the country. Despite these pressures, HDP’s youth assemblies have expressed their commitment to maintaining their rightful democratic struggle. 

Hişyar Özsoy
Vice co-chair of the HDP Responsible for Foreign Affairs
MP for Diyarbakır
20 June 2019