It is not known how many small children have to live with their mothers in Turkish prisons. The Turkish government leaves inquiries unanswered. The number 668 was last published in 2017.
One of these children is one and a half year old Arîn Hêvî. Her mother Nurcan Kizilkaya was arrested on terrorism charges in 2010 and later sentenced to six years and three imprisonment. After about three years of pre-trial detention, she was provisionally released. When the prison sentence became legally valid, she was taken to the Kocaeli F-type prison with the then six-month-old Arîn Hêvî a year ago.
Arîn Hêvî’s father, Mehmet Sani Kizilkaya, is a lawyer and took his daughter’s coloring book and pens to prison. However, these were not given to Arîn Hêvî. The reason given by the prison management was that the child was too small to paint.
Lawyer Kizilkaya explained: “There is a prison management in this country who considers my daughter to be one and a half years old enough to go to prison, but does not allow her to use pens and coloring books because she allegedly cannot hold the pen and cannot paint.”
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