State violence and human rights: the European human rights court cases submitted against Turkey on detention

Official URL: http://192.168.1.20/record=b1301484 (Table of Contents)

Turkey gave its citizens the right to individual petition to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in 1987. In the same year, via legislative decree, State of Emergency Rule which excluded the acts of the administration or responsibility of public servants in the field of emergency issues from judicial review was declared in seven provinces located in the Kurdish region. At the juncture of these two critical shifts that envisaged significant changes in the legal status of millions of people, the human rights violations committed predominantly against Kurds during the state of emergency period were carried to the ECtHR in the absence of an effective and accessible domestic judicial mechanism. In the years that followed, the ECtHR was bombarded with thousands of individual applications from southeast Turkey, whereby the narratives of violence taking place in the 1990s were for the first time heard in a public forum. Yet, despite the thousands of the judgments of the Court finding Turkey guilty of breaching the Convention requirements, the effect of these judgments remained limited at the domestic level as a result of the development of the official narrative of security and counter-terrorism alongside the human rights narratives and reforms. What I propose to do in this thesis is to delve into the dynamics of this dual development of seemingly contradictory narratives – whereby rights given by one hand were taken away by the other – by looking at the cases on alleged incidents of state killings or deaths in detention, submitted to the ECtHR against Turkey prior to May 2009. By looking at the ways of attribution of responsibility to the state and the transformation of the scopes of the cases by the Court in these proceedings, I try to understand the limitations of human rights law in denouncing state violence through locating the silences, exceptions and exclusions in the Court's reasoning.