Stockholm Center for Freedom

Stockholm Center for Freedom (SCF) is an advocacy organization that promotes the rule of law, democracy and fundamental rights and freedoms with a special focus on Turkey, a country with eighty million citizens that is experiencing a dramatic decline in its parliamentary democracy under its autocratic leadership.

The mission of the Stockholm Centre for Freedom is to:

• Document violations of the freedom of the press and the freedom of expression, including but not limited to keeping track of journalists who are detained, arrested, jailed, prosecuted, and convicted on trumped up charges fabricated by the authorities.
• Monitor the transformation of the media landscape in Turkey, track changes in media outlets, investigate ownership structures, identify propaganda machines run by the government, and expose the army of internet trolls that is clandestinely funded by the government to smear critics and opponents.
• Document cases of violations of the right to free enterprise, wrongful seizures of assets, and unlawful takeover of companies, and identify cases of arbitrary prosecution and jailing of businesspeople who are not aligned with the governing party’s ideology.
• Monitor mass purges that have been undertaken by the government to create a partisan bureaucracy or nomenklatura in the civil service that is flourishing on corruption, nepotism, and lack of transparency and accountability in governance.
• Scrutinize the judiciary, monitor the regress in the rule of law, question impunity in government officials, and track cases of mass purges and/or arrests of judges and prosecutors who have rendered judgments not to the liking of the government.
• Review Turkey’s performance on the fulfillment of the commitments it has made to regional and international rights organizations to which Turkey has acceded by ratifying conventions and treaties.
• Document cases of torture and ill treatment by authorities in detention centers, prisons, or other holding areas designated for suspects and inmates. Investigate suspicious deaths in police custody or in jails and review whether an effective enquiry is carried out to find out what happened in each case.
• Follow cases in which relatives and family members of those detained and arrested are subjected to ill treatment, torture, and harassment.
• Survey hate speech and hate crime cases, especially those committed by senior officials, against vulnerable groups including but not limited to foreign nationals, non-Muslims, Alevis, Kurds, Roma people and members of the Hizmet Movement.
• Document cases of violence against women, underage marriages, and sexual abuse of minors, and assess the progress on women’s empowerment, gender equality, and women’s participation in the labor force, and review legislative and judicial procedures to identify shortcomings in the system that hinder addressing problems.
• Monitor extremism and radical movements, especially those based on religious militancy in the predominantly Sunni nation of Turkey. Track hate-mongering clerics and enablers and facilitators of radical Islamist ideologies in Turkish society.
• Keep track of the Turkish government’s clandestine operations abroad, decode the parallel networks set up with slush funds to export the ongoing witch hunt in Turkey to overseas, uncover illegal profiling and harassment of critics and dissidents among expatriate communities, and reveal unlawful intelligence operations that violate the rights of Turkish citizens abroad.
• Survey environmental problems, monitor urbanization projects, and review major infrastructure projects and government contracts to make sure they proceed with the utmost respect for environmental concerns.

http://stockholmcf.org/