Die Initiative #freecihan bittet um die Unterstützung des am 25. Spetember 2020 in der Türkei inhaftierten Forschers, PhD-Studenten und Aktivisten Cihan Erdal
Der folgende Text ist leider nur auf Englisch verfügbar
Dear colleagues and friends,
Cihan Erdal, a PhD candidate and researcher at Carleton University in Canada and LGBTIQ activist has been detained in Istanbul-Turkey on 25 September 2020, along with 81 others, including academics, activists, and politicians as part of the prosecutions
against Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP). The warrants relate to October 2014 protests in Turkey sparked by the seizure of the mainly Kurdish Syrian town of Kobane by the ISIS armed group.
Cihan Erdal was recently running his doctoral fieldwork in Istanbul on youth-led social movements in Europe, including in Turkey, focused on the stories of young activists about their involvement in social movements. Along with his academic work, Erdal has
been involved in social movements as an activist for over a decade. He took roles in several political initiatives particularly on youth, left, LGBTIQ. He was a member of the HDP in 2014 as their youth representative. However, he has not been involved
actively in Turkish politics since he moved to Canada for his doctoral studies at Carleton in January, 2017. Erdal also hosted a weekly web-based TV program on youth and politics in 2017.
He is also currently the coordinator for the Center for Urban Youth Research in Canada, bringing together researchers, youth activists and young people from all over the world. This unfair and inappropriate accusation endangers the future of a promising
and brilliant young researcher in the social sciences.
We academics and researchers around the world defend Cihan Erdal and demand that the Turkish government free Cihan and that the Canadian government support his release.
We kindly request that university and academic institutions worldwide support Cihan Erdal, so that he may continue his research in freedom: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/12PX1XZYT4WEJG23n9pv0i2F0V1cfzICziMWDudeeS-E/viewform?edit_requested=true
Demand that the Turkish government #FreeCihan.
Demand the Canadian government support his release.
