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FOREWORD
Prompted by recent ongoing campaigns for education in Kurdish being waged by Kurdish university and school students across Turkey - campaigns which have faced harsh repression from Turkish authorities since they first began in the autumn of 2001 - KHRP sent a fact-finding delegation to Turkey in February 2002 in order to obtain accurate and objective information about the student campaign and to investigate the wider status of the Kurdish language both in Turkish law and in practice, not only in education but also in other areas of life including broadcasting, political discourse, civil society institutions, the justice system, cultural life, private and commercial life and the naming of children and places.
The mission delegation comprised minority rights expert Robert Dunbar from the School of Law at Glasgow University; Nazmi Gür, an experienced Kurdish human rights defender from Turkey and member of KHRP’s International Board of Patrons; and Fiona McKay, a human rights lawyer and Deputy Director of KHRP. This new report documents the mission’s findings and provides a thorough analysis of the situation from the point of view of applicable international legal standards, including the Copenhagen Criteria that Turkey will have to comply with before being accepted for entry into the European Union. This report also explores the basis for potential litigation under the European Convention on Human Rights along with challenges under other international mechanisms. At the conclusion of the report, the mission has compiled a detailed list of recommendations for reform.
This report comes at a time when Turkey is being pushed, in the context of the EU preaccession process, to give greater recognition to the rights of minorities, including language rights. As this report clearly reveals, Turkey has violated a number of international principles and standards regarding language rights and minority rights. As the mission members argue here, wide-ranging changes need to be made to the Turkish Constitution, to legislation and to policy and practice, before Turkey can be considered to have complied with international standards.
KHRP would like to thank the mission members, especially Robert Dunbar and Fiona McKay who prepared this report.
Kerim Yildiz
Executive Director
Kurdish Human Rights Project
London, June 2002
Introduction
On 20 November 2001, a group of students at Istanbul University signed a petition demanding the introduction of optional Kurdish lessons at the university, and announced their action at a press conference. This was to trigger the presentation of thousands of similar petitions at universities and high schools around the country, a clampdown from the authorities and reverberations around the country and beyond. By 14 February 2002, students at 24 universities across Turkey had attempted to hand in a total of 11,837 petitions and they had been joined by thousands of school pupils and their families who had presented their own petitions with respect to the teaching of Kurdish in primary and secondary schools. The response of the authorities was swift and harsh: by 14 February, 1,359 had been taken into custody, 143 had been remanded in custody, and 46 had been suspended from their school or university.1
The student campaign raised the issue of optional lessons in Kurdish, but this is just one aspect of the question of language rights in Turkey. KHRP decided to send a mission to Turkey in February 2002 to investigate the student campaign and the wider issues it raises regarding the status of the Kurdish language in Turkey. The aims of the mission were three-fold:
- To obtain accurate and objective information about the student campaign and the precise situation as regards the use of the Kurdish language in Turkish law and practice, not only in education but also in other areas of life including broadcasting, political discourse, civil society institutions, the justice system, cultural life, private and commercial life and the naming of children and places.
- To analyse the findings from the point of view of applicable international legal standards, including the Copenhagen Criteria that Turkey will have to comply with before being accepted for entry into the EU, and explore the basis for potential litigation under the European Convention on Human Rights and for challenges under any other international mechanism which applies to Turkey.
- To raise awareness both within Turkey and internationally of the actual status of the Kurdish language in Turkey and of any violations of international standards, and to make recommendations for reform.
The mission delegation comprised Robert Dunbar of the School of Law, Glasgow University, an expert in minority language rights; Nazmi Gür, an experienced Kurdish human rights defender from Turkey and member of KHRP’s International Board of Patrons; and Fiona McKay, a human rights lawyer and Deputy Director of KHRP.
In order to learn about the reality and impact of restrictions on the Kurdish language to the fullest extent possible, the delegation visited Istanbul in the West of Turkey, a city …
1 Information compiled by the Human Rights Association of Turkey (IHD) - Istanbul Branch, and distributed at a press conference held on 14 February 2002.
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