Contact visits which were suspended in prisons due to the coronavirus pandemic, started again on December 1 with the instruction of the Ministry of Justice. Drawing attention to the fact that half an hour of contact visit is not nearly enough, given that the prisoners are deliberatly sent to prisons so far from their hometowns, the families demands that the visiting hours to be extended.Aydi Baran, mother of Çetin Baran being held in Tekirdağ Prison told that sending prisoners so far from home is cruel. Demanding an end to this cruelty on the families of the prisoners, Baran called for the transfer of the prisoners to the prisons close to their hometowns.

 

HALF AN HOUR VISIT AFTER TWO YEARS

 

Stating that she hasn't seen her son in two years because he was sent to an extremely distant prison, Aydi Baran said: "I travelled thousand 176 kilometers to see my son for half an hour. Half an hour is not enough. I am a mother who hasn't seen her son in two years."

 

Protesting the degrading procedures before entering the prison such as strip searches, Baran said: "I have been to prisons for visits a lot. I haven't been searched like this before. They released the sex offenders and the killers and held the political prisoners in during the pandemic and they are torturing their families with these degrading searches and by putting them in very distant prisons." Underlining that there are dozens of Kurdish mothers who travels long hours just to see their children for half an hour, Baran said: "Most of these mothers don't know how to read and write just like me. We can not travel freely, we are afraid to get lost. Don't send our children to distant prisons. There are many families who can not travel to those prisons because they don't have the money for it. There are closer prisons. If they transfer our children there, we can easiy go visit them. We are mothers. We want to see our children."