Suchergebnisse

With its contextualized analysis of the European Court of Human Rights' (ECtHR) engagement in Turkey's Kurdish conflict since the early 1990s, Limits of Supranational Justice makes a much-needed contribution to scholarships on supranational courts and legal mobilization. Based on a socio-legal account of the efforts of Kurdish lawyers in mobilizing the ECtHR on behalf of abducted, executed, tortured and displaced civilians under emergency rule, and a doctrinal legal analysis of the ECtHR's jurisprudence in these cases, this book powerfully demonstrates the Strasbourg court's failure to end gross violations in the Kurdish region. It brings together legal, political, sociological and historical narratives, and highlights the factors enabling the perpetuation of state violence and political repression against the Kurds. The effectiveness of supranational courts can best be assessed in hard cases such as Turkey, and this book demonstrates the need for a reappraisal of current academic and jurisprudential approaches to authoritarian regimes.

With its contextualized analysis of the European Court of Human Rights' (ECtHR) engagement in Turkey's Kurdish conflict since the early 1990s, Limits of Supranational Justice makes a much-needed contribution to scholarships on supranational courts and legal mobilization. Based on a socio-legal account of the efforts of Kurdish lawyers in mobilizing the ECtHR on behalf of abducted, executed, tortured and displaced civilians under emergency rule, and a doctrinal legal analysis of the ECtHR's jurisprudence in these cases, this book powerfully demonstrates the Strasbourg court's failure to end gross violations in the Kurdish region. It brings together legal, political, sociological and historical narratives, and highlights the factors enabling the perpetuation of state violence and political repression against the Kurds. The effectiveness of supranational courts can best be assessed in hard cases such as Turkey, and this book demonstrates the need for a reappraisal of current academic and jurisprudential approaches to authoritarian regimes

Abstract
International courts face growing contestations to their authority. Scholars have conceptualized the forms and grounds of such resistance as well as the response of international courts. Much empirical research has focused on regional courts with human rights mandates. Yet, in focusing on overt resistance, not differentiating between authoritarian and democratic regimes, and depicting courts at the receiving end of resistance, scholarship does not account for discrete forms of resistance tolerated and enabled by courts. In addition, studies on the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) base their analyses exclusively on judgments, which constitute a mere 9 per cent of this Court's jurisprudence. This methodological bias, combined with a time frame limited to the post-2010s when the ECtHR has faced public contestations to its authority, have led to inaccurate and incomplete conclusions regarding the Strasbourg Court's response to backlash and illiberalism. This article calls for a goal-orientated conceptualization of resistance and a methodology that analyses the ECtHR's non-judgment jurisprudence in its entirety to reach accurate conclusions on its response to authoritarianism. Based on an in-depth and contextual analysis of the ECtHR-Turkey case, the article puts forth empirically grounded insights on authoritarian resistance and judicial complicity. It argues that authoritarian regimes seek to lessen international courts' oversight of their policies, not to undermine the authority of these courts as such, and that international courts are not always resilient vis-à-vis authoritarian resistance but can also be complicit with it. The forms of authoritarian resistance and judicial response depend on the institutional set-up of the human rights regime in question as well as the ways in which international courts exercise their review powers. The two phenomena influence and reinforce each other, resulting in the simultaneous or consecutive occurrence of various forms of authoritarian resistance and judicial response depending on the particular political context in which they interact.

Turkey's president Erdogan allows Kurdish villages to be razed and ousts opposition members of Parliament, while the EU turns a blind eye, compromising its core values.

The central research question this report addresses is whether and if so to what extent the ECHR and the ECtHR case law served to enhance the protection in Turkey of human rights in general and minority rights in particular. In doing so, the critical role the EU accession process has played in this regard by exerting external political pressure on the Turkish Government will be evaluated as a major positive variable. The report assesses the nature of claims raised by minorities and minority rights advocates. It seeks to offer an initial analysis of the efforts by authorities to implement the ECtHR case law through general and individual measures

Notwithstanding the ongoing negotiations between the PKK and the government, the crux of Turkey's Kurdish issue remains the structural inequalities against the Kurds, which are deeply rooted in an anti-democratic politico-legal regime. Certainly, Turkey has come a long way in acknowledging the Kurdish issue and taking steps to address the Kurds' demands for equality and the rule of law. Once banned from speaking their language, Kurds can now use it to attain a university education. The Kurdish region is no longer governed by a state of emergency, nor are Kurdish civilians disappearing under detention. There is no doubt that the European Court of Human Rights and the European Union have played an indispensable role in this transition. However, European institutions' engagement in the Kurdish issue has not always been coherent, while their impact on Turkey's policies has been limited, and at times negative, particularly in the post-9/11 context. Their uncritical oversight has facilitated Turkey's reluctance to undertake structural reforms to bring an end to the selective prosecution of Kurdish politicians, the criminalisation of non-violent advocacy of enhanced rights for the Kurds, the armament of civilians in the Kurdish region and the impunity of state officials who commit human rights violations. Recent developments in Turkey have shown, once again, that a genuine democratic transition will only be possible with the coherent, continuous and critical engagement of European institutions in the Kurdish issue. (SWP Research Paper)

This report is an attempt to understand the legal, political and economic constraints on media freedom and independence in Turkey through a historical lens for a critical analysis of the state-media relations. It analyzes and explains the actors and processes of media policy making in Turkey; the substance and implementation of such policies; the legal framework governing media content; the ownership structure of the media; the working conditions of journalists; self-regulation for ethical issues and self-censorship; and the emerging social efforts to combat discrimination and hate speech in the media