EUROPEAN HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION AGREES TO INVESTIGATE 3 FURTHER COMPLAINTS AGAINST TURKEY
Press Release: 26 October 1994
The Strasbourg based European Commission of Human Rights has agreed to investigate
three further cases brought by Kurds against Turkey alleging human rights
violations.
One of the cases declared admissible by the Commission claimed that during a search of his house, Turkish police officers had attempted to kill 17 year old Devrim BERKTAY in Diyarbakir (in south east Turkey) by throwing him over a balcony, four floors from ground level and by deliberately delaying his father from bringing himto a hospital for treatment. This was despite the fact that the police party searching the house had reported to their superiors that the search had disclosed nothing incriminating.
The further two cases declared admissible involved complaints by Nebahat AKKOC, the former Head of the Diyarbakir Branch of the Education and Science Workers Union (Egit-Sen), which claimed that she had been receiving threats as a result of her trade union activities, that her husband had been killed by the security forces, and that she had been subjected to severe torture at the hands of police officers at Diyarbakir police station as a direct result of her complaints brought to the European Commission of Human Rights against Turkey.
To date, the Commission has agreed to investigate six cases brought by Kurds against Turkey alleging indiscriminate killings, murder, disappearaces and torture by the Turkish security forces. The Kurdish applicants also alleged that the Turkish Government was pursuing a policy of death and destruction directed against Kurdish areas including the burning of villages and the expulsion of their inhabitants.
The individuals were helped to take their grievances
to Strasbourg by the Human Rights Association of Turkey and the Kurdish Human
Rights Projecct in London.
Please e-mail KHRP at khrp@khrp.org, to be placed on our Press Release mailing list.
For further information please contact: Kerim Yildiz, Executive Director / Fiona McKay, Deputy Director / Sally Eberhardt, Public Relations Officer Kurdish Human Rights Project on the address below.
