About 400 activists arrested in connection with the pride parade in Istanbul on Sunday have been released, according to the organizers.
One of the detainees who has now been released is a photographer for the news agency AFP and according to journalists on site, the media was banned from filming the parade.
Pride parades have been held in Turkey since 2003, but have been banned since 2015. The year before, in 2014, the parade attracted over 100,000 participants. Authorities claim that the ban on pride parades was issued for security reasons, but LGBTQ organizations accuse the Turkish government of waging a hate campaign against them.
The Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, Dunja Mijatovic, had called on Turkey to allow the Pride Parade to take place.
“The human rights of LGBTQ people in Turkey must be protected,” she said in a statement.