Turkey plans to allow prisoners to use communal areas in jails, but a human rights activist said yesterday this would not stop hunger-strike protests unless the "isolation" of inmates in new cell-based jails was ended.
The Justice Minister, Mr Hikmet Sami Turk, said on Thursday the government would try to rush an amendment to the anti-terrorism law through parliament next week in an effort to end the hungerstrikes.
The amendment scraps a ban, imposed for security reasons, on inmates coming together even in jail libraries and sports halls.
Twelve left-wing prisoners and two of their family members have died since late March in protest against the new jails. They say the cells, which replace a dormitory system, isolate them and make them vulnerable to abuse by prison officials.
"This [ending of the ban] is not enough to persuade the hunger-striking prisoners," Mr Husnu Ondul, head of the Turkish Human Rights Association, said. "The amendment allows the use of communal areas by inmates who attend the training and rehabilitation programmes with obedience," he added. "The amendment in its present form does not end the isolation conditions."
Mr Ongul argued that inmates might resist the training programmes, as the new prisons were mainly home to those imprisoned for their political views. "The state cannot force them to change their ideology. There'll be a resistance to that."
More than 800 far-left prisoners are on hunger-strike or death fasts.