ISHR welcomes news of the release of Turkish human rights advocate, journalist, and 2012 Alliance for Historical Dialogue and Accountability (AHDA) Fellow Murat Çelikkan from prison on Saturday, October 21, 2017.
Çelikkan was sentenced to 1 year and 6 months in prison in Turkey for participating in the Editors-in-Chief on Watch campaign for Özgür Gündem daily, a newspaper that was closed through a statutory decree issued under Turkey's State of Emergency.
Beginning in 1937, many calendars began designating October 9th as "Columbus Day." However, over the past several years - especially since the adoption of the historic UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples 10 years ago - a growing number of places in the USA have done away with the “Columbus” part and renamed the day “Indigenous Peoples’ Day”. These include the states of Alaska, and Vermont and the cities of Seattle, Albuquerque, San Francisco, Denver, Bangor CityMaine and, most recently, Los Angeles and Cambridge.
Congratulations to Tim Wyman-McCarthy, a 2016 Human Rights M.A. graduate, on beginning his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is studying in the Department of Rhetoric.
