Campaign to delist the PKK launched in Canada

In Canada, the international campaign for the removal of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) from the EU and US terror lists has been launched with a demonstration in Toronto. The demonstration on Sunday, organised by the Kurdish People’s Council of Toronto and the Sara Women’s Commune, also called for the isolation of PKK founder Abdullah Öcalan in Turkish custody to be lifted and commemorated the Kurdish women revolutionaries Sakine Cansız, Fidan Doğan, Leyla Şaylemez, Sêvê Demir, Fatma Uyar and Pakize Nayır, who were murdered by the Turkish state.

The demonstrators marched through busy streets for two hours and concluded their action with a rally in front of the city hall.  

The campaign by the Justice for Kurds initiative was launched in December last year by dozens of internationally known personalities such as the Austrian Nobel laureate for literature Elfriede Jelinek, international law expert Norman Paech and Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek and is now supported by more than a thousand intellectuals from many different countries. The aim is to decriminalise the Kurdish liberation movement.

The campaign is expected to last several months and aims to collect four million signatures. The signatures will be sent to the Council of Europe and to the relevant institutions responsible for the “terror list” in the USA. They will also serve as a reference for members of national parliaments and put the issue on the agenda of state parliaments.

The petition can be signed online, and in Europe signatures have also been collected on the streets for some time.

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