I happened to see this post, and I'd like to add some words from the other side of the barbed wire.
It's a puzzle for me why posts like this are controversial here. I have never been in Turkey, and I belive, the situation there is better than in Russia, where I live. Anyway, independently on this concrete case, it is evident for me that the idea to eliminate morality, humanity, solidarity and everything what is not yet well axiomatized, from profession, is a way to Animal Farm.
Of course it is natural, and moreover, inevitable that people separate profession from the rest of the life. In science it's a part of abstract thinking. But this does not mean that professionals can become robots. This continues my old discussion with people at tea.mathoverflow. Look what happens to laywers, jornalists, historians, artists, writers, state employees, even physicians in modern Russia. I assure you, they believe that they are good professionals. And they have reasons to think this. And (visually) they are not monsters from horror films. They just separate profession from the rest of the life consistently, without doubts.
When you do this, your professional life becomes simple, but only until the moment when you meet people from another profession. (Is there a necessity to explain this?)
You may think that this is something specifically Russian, an old tradition, a peculiarity that can't manifest itself in your country. But this is not so, I dare to say that the rational explanation of this is very simple: the lack of horizontal connections between people, and it can manifest itself everywhere.
And it is easy to see that when professionals separate their profession from the world too consistently (this happens all the way everywhere), this becomes an obstacle for the developement even for the developement of the profession itself. As an illustration, you can look at the discussion about the axiomatization of quantum mechanics that I initiated not long ago (excuse me for self-references): a simple and natural mathematical question becomes controversial, because "you actually can't ask this".
In 1990ies many Russian mathematicians left Russia. Some people say, 50%. I hope, that was good for Western mathematics, because many good mathematicians came to the West. But evidently that was awful for Russian mathematics, because nobody from the West came to Russia instead.
So I want to ask, wouldn't it be better for mathematics if this necessity for Russian mathematicians to run away from their own country did not exist? I would say, the world would be much more comfortable for mathematicians if they could seek job everywhere: Russian mathematicians in the West, western mathematicians in Russia, and all mathematicians everywhere.
What mathematicians can do for this is trying to be people, not robots. When you see a colleague in trouble, you shouldn't kill your human motives. Help him. In feudal societies where many mathematicians live now, the help from colleagues from abroad is often the only hope.
EDIT 26.04.2016. Stefan Kohl informed you already that Kivanç Ersoy has been released eventually. I also received this letter of 22.04.2016 from Giovanni Falcone. And four days before, 18.04.2016, I read news about Sergei Mohnatkin, a Russian human rights activist. This can be a good illustration for our dispute. Sergei Mohnatkin is not an active mathematician, he only has a mathematical education, but for what I want to say this is not very important, because what happened to him happens to active mathematicians as well (see e.g. here or here -- however, these people have loud names in the scientific world, in contrast to Mohnatkin, that is the qualitative difference, I believe). Mohnaktin's crime was that once in 2009 he was going down the street (at that moment he worked as a pizza peddler, a person who brings pizza to clients, and he had pizza at his hands), and accidentally he saw how police disperse a demonstration in defence of Constitution. You know mathematicians: everything illogical causes protest in their souls. When he saw a policeman rudely dragging a woman into a police car, he stood up for this woman. The policeman dragged him as well, and put him into prison. He was released only two years later, in 2012. After that he began to participate the demonstrations in defense of Constitution, and in 2013 they again put him into prison, and he is still there. On April 18, 2016, it became known that they broke his spine.
