Rights groups have condemned as illegal and discriminatory a ban on LGBTI events in the Turkish capital one week after President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan described empowering gay people as being “against the values of our nation”.

The Ankara governor’s office said on Sunday night it was imposing a ban on all LGBTI cultural events until further notice, citing threats to “public order” and the fear of “provoking reactions within certain segments of society,” days after it banned a festival on German-language gay films in the capital city.

The ban is the latest in a series of attempts by the ruling Justice and Development (AK) party to curtail the activities of Turkey’s LGBTI rights movement, and to impose what critics say is a public morality rooted in Islam.

The annual Istanbul gay pride parade was cancelled for the third year in a row in 2017 on security grounds, and last week Erdoğan condemned the main opposition bloc, the Republican People’s party (CHP), for a plan that would introduce a “gay quota” for employees in a local municipality.

Erdoğan described the party as “waging war against the values of our nation”.

“There can be no legitimate or legal grounds for such a wholesale ban that touches the core of rights,” said Pembe Hayat and Kaos GL, two Ankara-based LGBTI organisations in a statement following the measure, adding that the general and open-ended nature of the ban risks “criminasing LGBTI existence”.



“With this announcement the civil administration is endangering public safety by turning LGBTIs and civil society organisations, who are an important part of the public, into targets instead of fulfilling its duty to ensure public security,” the statement added.

“In our country, where discrimination and hate based on sexual orientation and gender identity is rampant, it is the duty of national and local administrations to combat this discrimination and hate.”

Homosexuality has been legal since the creation of the modern Turkish republic in 1923, and was also legalised in the Ottoman empire from the mid-19th century. However, LGBTI individuals in the country frequently complain of mistreatment including harassment, abuse and rape as well as animosity.



Erdoğan’s critics have long accused the president, who once said that he wished to raise a “devout generation” of attempting to impose a morality rooted in Sunni Islam on a polarised society. The polarisation has only increased in the aftermath of a failed coup attempt last year and an ensuing crackdown that has targeted both individuals complicit in the attempted putsch and dissidents more broadly.

This month, a new law that would allow religious scholars to conduct civil marriages was signed by the president, and a new education curriculum has removed the theory of evolution from high-school textbooks and introduced a state-approved lesson on the concept of jihad.

The announcement by the Ankara governor’s office said the ban would include films, plays, exhibitions, panels and other events in an effort to protect “public order and public health and morals” as well as due to certain “social sensitivities”.



