Advocates of Silenced Turkey (AST) will host Freedom Convention 2020 on December 9-10 to address all human rights violations in Turkey regarding civil, political, economic, social and cultural as contained in the basic human rights documents. This two-day conference takes place on United Nations Human Rights Day, which is celebrated annually across the world on Dec. 10 every year to honor the United Nations General Assembly’s adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the first global enunciation of human rights.

For the last 3 years, AST has been raising awareness about the human rights violations in Turkey and advocating for the rights of persecuted people. The 2016 coup attempt made an accelerating impact on Turkey’s already fraying democratic mechanisms and allowed President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s administration to launch a sweeping purge. More than 150,000 public workers, including generals, admirals, judges, prosecutors, doctors, teachers, police officers and etc., have been summarily sacked by emergency decrees without due process leading to human rights violations against hundreds of thousands of people. Freedom Convention 2020 is a unique convention for human rights activists, intellectuals and policymakers focused on human rights violations in Turkey.