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A complicated affair: Turkey’s Kurds and the European Court of Human Rights

  • 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.
Metadaten
Document Type:Part of a Book
Language:English
Author(s):Dilek Kurban, Haldun Gulalp
Parent Title (English):The European Court of Human Rights: Implementing Strasbourg’s Judgments on Domestic Policy
Publisher:Edinburgh Univ. Press
Place of Publisher:Edinburgh
Publication year:2013
Publishing Institution:Hertie School
First Page:166
Last Page:187
ISBN:978 0 7486 7057 4
Release Date:2015/08/06
Tag:The implementation of the European Court of Human Rights judgments on the Kurdish conflict in Turkey
Licence of document (German):Metadaten / metadata
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