Turkey Convicted of Banning Kurdish in Prison
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) issued a verdict on the case of Nusret Kaya and Others v. Turkey, a case concerned the fact that Turkish prisoners were not allowed to use the Kurdish language in their telephone conversations with their relatives.
The court found Turkey guilty of violating “right to respect for private and family life and correspondence”, ordering the Turkish state to pay non-pecuniary damages to the applicants.
Court: Speak Turkish!
Some of the principal facts and applicants’ complaints read as follows:
Applicants Nusret Kaya, Ahmet Gerez, Mehmet Şirin Bozçalı, Mesut Yurtsever and Mehmet Nuri Özen, who were inmates of prisons in Muş and Bolu, were prevented by the prison authorities from conducting telephone conversations in Kurdish with their relatives.
They called upon the competent sentence-execution judges to have those restrictions lifted, but each of their requests was denied in decisions given between 29 May 2006 and 10 June 2008.
The judges took the view that the practice of the prison authorities was compliant with procedure and with the law, basing their finding on the applicable rules according to which inmates’ telephone conversations had to be conducted in Turkish.
Each of the applicants appealed against the decision of the sentence-execution judge that specifically concerned them, but the Assize Courts dismissed their appeals, finding that the decisions had not been in breach of procedure or of the law.
Relying on Article 8 (right to respect for private and family life and correspondence) and Article 6 (right to a fair trial), the applicants complained that they had sustained a breach of their right to respect for their telephone communications and that they had not had a fair trial as some hearings had not been held in public and the domestic courts had not given sufficient reasoning for their judgments.
ECHR: Not in a democratic society
The applications were lodged with the European Court of Human Rights on 4 October 2006, 24 June 2008, 24 July 2008 and 25 November 2008.
The court issued a verdict on April 22. While the court held that there had been a violation of Article 8 (right to respect for private and family life and correspondence), it cited that “there had been no violation of Article 6 § 1 (right to a fair hearing within a reasonable time)”.
The court ordered Turkey to pay 300 euros (EUR) in respect of non-pecuniary damage to each of the applicants Ahmet Gerez, Mehmet Şirin Bozçalı, Mehmet Nuri Özen and Mesut Yurtsever, and EUR 500 to Mesut Yurtsever and Mehmet Nuri Özen, jointly, and to Mehmet Şirin Bozçalı, individually, in respect of costs and expenses.
The Court also found that the restriction constituted an interference with the right of prisoners to respect for their family life and their correspondence and that it was not necessary in a democratic society. (AS/BM)
* Click here to read the article in Turkish.