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Turkey’s broad-based anti-terrorism law, open to interpretation that permits the abuse of the human rights of its ethnic and religious minorities, demands serious scrutiny by the international community. At the center of the latest example is Father Aho Sefer Bilecen, a Syriac Christian monk and head of the Monastery of Mar Yaqoub. On April 7, a Turkish court sentenced him to two years and one month in prison on terrorism-related charges.
The crime for which he must spend the next two years of his life in prison? One day, in 2018, he gave bread and water to two people who knocked at the door of his monastery and asked for some means of sustenance, not an unusual occurrence in the rural areas of Turkey. The strangers happened to be members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, a designated terrorist group.