Human Rights Association (Turkey)
Open-knowledge reference entry

The Human Rights Association (Turkish: İnsan Hakları Derneği, İHD) is an NGO for advancing Human rights in Turkey, founded in 1986 and headquartered in Ankara.
Establishment
The İHD's origins can be traced to the victims of the purges in the aftermath of the military coup of 1980 and was founded on 17 July 1986. The 98 founding members comprised lawyers, journalists, intellectuals, but mainly relatives of political prisoners. The organization works on all kind of human rights, but is mainly focused on abuses in Turkey. After in 1992 the IHD came under scrutiny from the public for not holding the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) accountable for their war crimes, the IHD acknowledged that in the southeast Turkey was raging a war. In 1992, the statute was changed to cover humanitarian aspects as laid out in the Geneva Conventions. The IHD also criticized human rights violations of armed groups like the PKK which lead to criticism both by the PKK as the Turkish Government wanted the PKK to be mentioned as a terrorist organization and not a party in a conflict.
Structure and campaigns
Official figures of the İHD claim 10,000 members, in 29 branches in 81 provinces of Turkey. The 24 board members are elected for terms of two years on the association's general assembly. The headquarters in Ankara as well as many branches (in particular the branches in Istanbul and Diyarbakir) are running commissions according to the need.
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This entry incorporates text from “Human Rights Association (Turkey)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.