MAR

KHRP is pleased to announce the publication of a statement in response to the United Kingdom Foreign & Commonwealth Office Annual Report on Human Rights 2009, which was released last Thursday 18 March 2009.

KHRP largely welcomes the overview provided, which reiterates a variety of the concerns that KHRP continues to address across the Kurdish regions. In particular, it was pleased to see that KHRP’s concerns about the rights of Syria’s estimated 1.7 million Kurds who suffer ongoing discrimination, lack of political representation, and repression of their identities, was given a detailed appraisal in the Report. KHRP also joins the UK FCO in applauding the Turkish government’s self-termed Democratic Opening, (though it has concerns about how open and transparent this initiative is). KHRP is however uneasy about the degree to which the continued pervasiveness of human rights violations in the Kurdish regions of Turkey and Iran are not fully reflected.

Although Turkey is not one of the FCO’s ‘6 Countries of Concern’, and the report is not intended to provide an exhaustive human rights analysis ‘for every country in the world’, KHRP believes that elements of the picture the FCO have painted are misleading. Meanwhile, given that Iran is designated as one of the FCO’s 6 countries of concern, it is disconcerting that their more detailed analysis, unlike that provided for Syria, stops short by simply alluding to minorities in the Kurdistan region, without actually reflecting on the situation of Kurds; Iran’s second largest minority group.

The full KHRP response to the FCO Annual Report on Human Rights 2009 can be downloaded from our website here.