The accession of Turkey to the EU has traditionally been an important topic for right-wing and far-right campaigns. This time, even though it did appear in the context of immigration and prejudices against Islam, it did not play a major role in the campaigns. That does not mean, though, that Turkey will be off the far-right agenda. Quite the opposite, Turkey for them is a symbol of many things they are against: migrants and Muslims.

Clearly, the most important trigger issue for Turkey had been the Kurdish question. In a Syria undergoing regime change, Turkey wanted to be on the good side of the potential new rulers from the start. Through first the Foreign Ministry , and later all its units, it started taking into its ambit all Syrian opposition, first the Muslim Brotherhood and the National Council, and then the pro-Al Qaida Al Nusra Front and Iraq Damascus Islamic State.

Since the year 2012 when privatization gained speed, the share of the public sector has shrunk while that of the private sector has rapidly grown in terms of both installed capacity and generation.

The Law for Supporting Tourism is among the main culprits behind the invasion of coasts and forests by five-star hotels from 1980s onwards. The Turkish tourism industry grew by an annual 15% versus a worldwide average of 6.8% from 1985 to 2005. The plan sets targets such as a bed capacity of 1.5 million, over 40 million tourists and an income of 50 billion dollars from foreign tourists.

The AKP’s 2023 vision includes the demand for a “unitary executive.” Nonetheless, the 2014 presidential elections might potentially create a dualistic or two-headed model vacillating between the parliamentary and presidential systems. This possibility would quickly become reality under the presidency of a leader such as Erdoğan.

On December 17, 2013, a hitherto unseen graft probe was initiated. When faced with accusations of corruption, the government did not choose to support an independent judiciary probe that would either have either prosecuted or acquitted the accused, as should be the case in a democratic society. Instead, the government passed legislative changes to bring the judiciary under its control.

Street children are individuals who have refused to passively succumb to domestic abuse, have either opted to abandon home with immense courage or were forced to do so by their parents, and are now struggling to survive in the face of very tough conditions on the street.

The juvenile justice system must be a part of a child-friendly justice and a holistic child protection system of a country as enshrined in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Avoiding the deprivation of liberty, fast and fair judicial procedures, rehabilitation and restorative justice are some of the objectives in this system.

One in every three marriages in Turkey involves a child bride, and more than one third of girls married off are not the first wives of their husbands. The marriage age for girls goes as low as 12, and Turkey is in the top 10 for child marriages worldwide.

The nuclear family structure praises children as the ”apple of the eye“ on the one hand, but reduces them to dolls deprived of will and action on the other.