Erhan Dogan, a 39-year-old Kurdish schoolteacher from Turkey’s eastern province of Elazig, says he first experienced torture on the night of July 26, 2016. It began following his arrest by Turkish police in Ankara on terrorism charges.

Dogan says he was repeatedly beaten and kicked in the ribs and on the head, his hands cuffed behind him. He was suspended by a rope attached to his wrists for two hours at a time. He was blindfolded and threatened with rape as his tormentors ran their clubs over his buttocks and groin. A bucket of ice-cold water was poured over his head, then it would start all over again. When interrogators threatened to rape his wife and daughter “if you don’t give us names,” Dogan says he knew they were serious, because he had seen three young women being hauled off at the makeshift detention center and heard their anguished screams.

“That’s when I decided to kill myself; it was the fifth day,” Dogan recalled. “I was going to knot my T-shirt into a noose from a pipe over the toilet, but my faith intervened.” On the ninth day, he was told he was being transferred to Ankara’s Sincan Prison. “I felt rewarded; I was overjoyed," he said.

Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power 18 years ago pledging “zero tolerance” for torture. For a while, it seemed sincere. AKP leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan was determined to end the military’s grip over politics for he knew how much the men in uniform hated him and his fellow Islamists. Ending army tutelage was one of the top conditions laid down by the European Union to launch full membership talks with Turkey.