President Erdoğan hails women's rights, vows action against violence

We can never accept women to be discriminated against due solely to their gender and be exposed to violence

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan hosted female village mukhtars from across the country on Tuesday on the occasion of International Women's Day. Addressing the event held at the Presidential Complex in the capital Ankara, Erdoğan lauded Turkey's progress in terms of women's rights and decried acts of violence toward women, Qazet.az reports.

"Women are one-half of a whole. We can never accept women to be discriminated against due solely to their gender and be exposed to violence. Our faith, our culture, our Constitution require us to attach the value they deserved to women. Unfortunately, we have seen practices contradicting these," he told hundreds of female administrators of neighborhoods and villages. He was referring to discrimination toward headscarf-wearing women before, during and after the notorious 1997 coup. The president noted that they restored the right to education for women who were deprived of this right for wearing headscarves.

"Though the Constitution gives the right to work to everyone regardless of gender, women were deprived of this right in the public sector but we reinstated this right," Erdoğan said, noting that they made affirmative action for women a part of the Constitution.