TY - CHAP A1 - Kurban, Dilek A1 - Gulalp, Haldun T1 - A complicated affair: Turkey’s Kurds and the European Court of Human Rights T2 - The European Court of Human Rights: Implementing Strasbourg’s Judgments on Domestic Policy N2 - Obsessed with the preservation of national unity and homogeneity, the Turkish state has since its inception had little tolerance for Kurdish demands for greater legal recognition and a measure of autonomy. However, its 1987 decision to give its citizens the right to petition the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) to enhance its chances for membership to the European Union (EU) obliged the state to confront, at the transnational level, the Kurdish demands for human rights protection and equal treatment. The cases taken to the ECtHR by Kurdish civilians revealed that cloaked in the language of ‘war on terrorism’, the Turkish military had committed egregious violations including the forced displacement of civilians , the destruction of property, the burning of forests, as well as extra-judicial killings, disappearances and torture. Turkey’s EU candidacy increased the existing international pressure on the government to revise its mode of dealing with the insurgency and with Kurdish political and cultural demands more generally. The EU demanded that Turkey first and foremost execute the ECtHR’s judgments on Kurdish issues, but also grant the Kurds limited linguistic rights in order to fulfil minority rights protection as part of the membership accession criteria. Yet, as argued in this chapter, although there has been some improvement, the problem has not been eradicated nor has there been any substantive change in government policy on the Kurdish question. KW - The implementation of the European Court of Human Rights judgments on the Kurdish conflict in Turkey Y1 - 2013 UR - https://opus4.kobv.de/opus4-hsog/frontdoor/index/index/docId/1634 SN - 978 0 7486 7057 4 SP - 166 EP - 187 PB - Edinburgh Univ. Press CY - Edinburgh ER -