Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Working Paper (17)
- Article (6)
- Part of a Book (6)
- Contribution to a Periodical (6)
- Book (2)
Keywords
- Anti-discrimination in Turkey (4)
- Turkey (3)
- EU-Turkey refugee deal (2)
- Government policies on internal displacement (2)
- Turkey-EU relations (2)
- Constitutional protection of minorities in Turkey (1)
- Democracy in Turkey (1)
- Democratization and EU reforms in Turkey (1)
- ECtHR Jurisprudence on Minorities in Turkey (1)
- European Court of Human Rights (1)
Research on media independence and freedom of press in any country, particularly in Turkey, requires more than an analysis of the regulatory framework. It is the political and ideological factors that lie behind the anti-democratic and repressive laws, rather than the content and implementation of these laws that can explain why and under which circumstances an independent and free media fails to emerge in a given country. This report is an attempt to understand the legal, political and economic constraints on media freedom and independence in Turkey through a historical lens
The report, drafted for European Equality Law Network (the European network of legal experts in gender equality and non-discrimination), is part of a study into measures to combat discrimination in the EU Member States and candidate countries, funded by the European Commission Directorate-General for Justice and Consumers. The report provides an overview of Turkey's implementation of the EU anti-discrimination Directives up to 31 December 2015 and follows up on earlier reports drafted by the author for the same project.
Merkel's Deal with Turkey
(2015)
The Council of Europe's enlargement rendered reforming the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) inevitable. The post-1998 reforms aimed at transforming the ECtHR into a quasi- constitutional court and enhancing its efficiency. This article is concerned with one such reform, ‘the pilot judgment mechanism’, and contests the desirability of its application to gross and systematic violations. The article discusses why, contrary to opposing claims, the ECtHR’s judgment in Doğan and Others v Turkey concerning the forced eviction of Kurdish civilians by the Turkish military is a pilot judgment. It then shows why this matters, based on the Court’s İçyer decision which found a compensation law the Turkish government adopted in response to Doğan and Others to be an effective domestic remedy and rejected 800-1,500 pending cases. Based on empirical research on the implementation of this law, the article argues that in applying the pilot judgment to the Kurdish cases, the ECtHR reduced the notion of ‘effective remedy’ to compensation, overlooking the victims’ demands for truth and justice, and enabled Turkey to continue to commit gross violations with impunity. It concludes that while pilot-judgments might be effective in handling repetitive cases arising from systemic legal problems in post-communist contexts, they should not be applied to conflict or post-conflict cases where the underlying problems are deeply-rooted ethno-political disputes.
At the invitation of the Turkish government, the Representative of the UN Secretary General on Internally Displaced Persons Francis Deng undertook a fact finding mission to Turkey in 2002. Deng summed up his findings and recommendations in a report submitted to the UN Commission on Human Rights. This report, co-published by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) and the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundations (TESEV) provides a comprehensive assessment of the Turkish government's implementation of Deng's recommendations on the basis of empirical data derived from field research conducted in provinces populated with Kurdish displaced. The report concludes that while some progress has been made in the official recognition of the problem of conflict-induced displacement, the adoption of a law to partially compensate the material losses of the displaced, there are significant outstanding issues concerning the right to return, property rights (including the right to restitution or compensation), the social and economic integration of the displaced, and finally the establishment of truth and justice concerning the gross human rights abuses committed by security forces against the Kurdish displaced in the 1990s.