Following is President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s message on Human Rights Day:
I congratulate our citizens’ Human Rights Day on the occasion of the 74th anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations General Assembly.
Respect towards humans and protecting human rights are among the basic principles of our deep-rooted state tradition and culture of co-existence dating back centuries.
Guided by these principles, we have carried out a silent revolution so-to-speak by removing the obstacles to the exercise of rights and freedoms through the comprehensive reforms we have introduced over the past two decades.
We have replaced the Jacobin mentality, which had cast a shadow over our democracy for long years, with an egalitarian, embracive and libertarian understanding of administration that is human-oriented particularly in the citizen-state relations.
We have displayed this humanitarian stance of ours also in the face of conflicts taking place in our geography from Somalia to Syria, Afghanistan to Ukraine.
Hosting millions of innocents fleeing conflict zones, Türkiye has been the only country that has been endeavoring sincerely for the restoration of peace, stability and serenity since the very beginning.
By materializing the Black Sea grain corridor and prisoner swap deal, we have contributed to the solution of the food and energy crisis that adversely affects the lives of billions of people.
We see the fight we conduct against terrorist organizations on multiple fronts as a manifestation of the importance our country attaches to humans as well as to the protection of human life and the exercise of fundamental rights and freedoms.
We will determinedly continue our fight until we make sure that these enemies of humanity, who seek to make fortune out of innocents’ blood, cease to pose a threat to our country and nation.
In this process, we will continue to speak up against oppression, pressure, injustice, lawlessness and hypocrisy wherever in the world, starting from our region.
With these thoughts in my mind, I wish that the Human Rights Day may lead to auspicious developments particularly for those whose fundamental rights have been usurped, and celebrate the whole world’s Human Rights Day in front of our august nation.