Administrative repression against Kurds in France has recently reached a new level with the expulsion in less than two weeks of three Kurdish activists to Turkey, in defiance of the fundamental principles enshrined in the French constitution.

The Conseil Démocratique Kurde en France (Kurdish Democratic Council - France, CDK-F) urged the French authorities to "put an end to this infamous repression which has no place in the rule of law," and called "on all human rights defenders, all people attached to the values and principles of the Republic, to denounce with us the iniquitous attitude of the French authorities towards Kurdish activists in order to prevent further deliveries to the dictatorship of Erdoğan."

The CDK-F called on people to attend the demonstration to be held tomorrow, 27 April, at 2 pm in Place de la République in Paris. 

The statement said: "The Kurds are victims of terrorism, as they were twice in France in 2013 and 2022; they fought terrorism, as in Kobanê, Raqqa, Shengal and elsewhere, where the fight against jihadist obscurantism cost thousands of young lives. The Kurdish movement is a resistance movement against oppression. Its activists have never represented a threat to French public order. To pretend otherwise is to insult the Kurds and dishonor the values of France."

Background

Serhat Gültekin, a 28-year-old young man suffering from a serious genetic disease and sentenced in Turkey to years in prison for his political activism, was stripped of his most fundamental rights: literally kidnapped by the police, he was tied up, gagged and delivered like a package to Turkey. Today, Serhat is locked up in Erdoğan's jails where he must serve a sentence of more than six years.

The relentlessness of the French administration against the young asylum seeker, in disregard of the principle of non-refoulement and the rights of the defense, testifies to a worrying deterioration of the rule of law in France. This is a total denial of law and justice, synonymous with collaboration with Erdoğan’s authoritarian regime.
To remain silent in the face of this administrative repression is to allow other Kurdish activists to be sent into the den of the wolf. And the list is long of Kurdish activists hit by asset freezing measures, withdrawals of status by OFPRA and expulsion procedures: hundreds of men and women exposed to total insecurity, living daily in the fear of being handed over to a dictatorship from which they thought they were safe.