NGOs demand transparency, effective social assistance

The platform, which is composed of 30 civil society organizations, was established recently to monitor public expenditures on social assistance, protection of children, education, youth and the military.

The platform sent a letter to parliamentary deputies explaining that public expenditures in these areas currently come from different sources and outlining the aim of the platform to make it easy to monitor those expenditures.

The platform’s report criticizing the effectiveness of the government’s social assistance also indicates that it is a democratic request for military expenditures to be transparent and open to monitoring by civil society and Parliament.

“The most critical difficulty in monitoring military expenditures is the lack of transparency. The biggest deficiency is in the expenditures of the Foundation to Strengthen the Turkish Armed Forces [TSKGV]. The foundation’s expenditures have not been disclosed since 2000. Also the expenses of institutions whose budgets are secret or not public are not known,” the report of the platform underlined.

According to the report, another difficulty in monitoring public expenditures on the military is the situation of the village guards, a system that hires local people to fight terrorism. There are claims that the village guard system leads to corruption. According to the platform, it is not clear how much is spent on the village guards and their weaponry.

‘Social protection assistance is a right to every citizen’

The platform underlined that for 2010 social benefits and assistance are expected to be 13 percent of Turkey’s gross domestic product (GDP), versus 11 percent last year. According to the platform it is a positive sign that despite the economic crisis the percentage of the country’s GDP devoted to social benefits was not lowered, but when compared with European countries it is obvious that this proportion is not adequate. In EU countries, according to the report, the average is around 25 percent.

The platform underlined that social assistance to people who do not pay premiums comprises just 1.3 percent of the GDP and said that such a situation strengthens the imbalances in society. Turkish society suffers from high amounts of social exclusion based on ethnic differences, gender and poverty.

The report suggested that the biggest deficit in the chain of the social protection system in Turkey is the lack of regular income support as a citizenship right.

The platform underlined that in order to benefit from social assistance, people must prove that they are in need, which leads to stigmatization. According to the platform, such a situation harms human dignity and violates human rights.

“We believe that to implement regular income support without stigmatizing people them but rather as a right of citizenship will be an important tool against poverty and social exclusion,” the report said.

The platform also said the unemployment fund should be used for social protection, should be transparent and that the money in the fund should not be transferred to fund other areas.

Civil society organizations, regarding health expenditures, underlined that only those people who pay premiums are able to benefit from the health system, pointing out that Turkey has the lowest health expenditures per capita in Europe.

Platform also indicated that child poverty is highest in Turkey among countries and that the amount spent on children for non- Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) educational services is just 1.075 percent of GDP. According to the report, only 0.2 percent is allocated from the budget, which means young people are not considered in the budget.

The platform, in its second report, examined the policies and the expenditures of the Social Services and Child Protection Agency (SHÇEK) and claimed that the agency, rather than protecting children, more often protects the family.

According to the report, SHÇEK is aiming to support families and by this way keep children with their families, but since there is not enough monitoring for the children, the SHÇEK can turn into an institution that merely distributes social assistance to the families instead of being a child protection agency.