ECHR condemns Turkey in 3 rights cases

Cases against Turkey at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) constitute 20 percent of total, the largest proportion among the 47 members of the Council of Europe.

Turkey’s European Union accession process has been effectively frozen for some three years, partly due to widespread human rights abuses in the country.

Europe’s top human rights courts issued rulings against Turkey in three cases involving a prostituted minor, a former army officer and a human rights lawyer.

In the case of 14-year-old prostituted girl N.Ç., the court found that the minor’s rights to privacy had been violated during legal proceedings that began in 2003 and that she had been subjected to inhuman or degrading treatment. 

Human rights lawyer Ramazan Demir’s freedom to receive information and ideas was violated while in pre-trial detention in 2016 on terrorism charges, when he was refused access to the websites of the ECHR and Turkey’s constitutional court and official gazette to use as resources for his and his clients’ defence, the ECHR found. 

Demir represents several Kurdish politicians, including a former leader and lawmakers of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP).

“Neither the authorities nor the government had explained why the contested measure had been necessary in the present case,” the ECHR said, referring to the prison’s decision to restrict Internet access due to a perceived danger posed by Demir. “It followed that the interference in question had not been necessary in a democratic society,” the court said.

Former Vice Admiral Kadir Sagdic, accused by Turkish prosecutors of plotting to overthrow the government, suffered damage to his reputation that “attained the threshold of gravity required to bring it within the scope of Article 8”, ECHR said, referring to his right to privacy.

Domestic courts had not sought a proper balance between Sağdıç’s right to privacy and freedom of the press, the court found. The content of several articles published in daily Taraf and Yeni Safak newspapers in 2009 were “incompatible with the standards of responsible journalism”, it said.

By November 2019, the ECHR had fined Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) governments over $50 million for violations of the convention. 

The ECHR found Turkey to have committed 3,309 human rights violations since the foundation of the court in 1959. The most common violations were of freedom of expression, right to a fair, and the right to liberty and security.