Sub-sub-series 37 - Hasan İlhan

1 file

Materials pertaining to the case filed by Hasan İlhan on 23 July 1993 against the Republic of Turkey with the European Commission of Human Rights (application number 22494/93, referred to internally within the Kurdish Litigation Project as Case 9 and assigned to Françoise Hampson as lead) regarding the 1992 destruction of his home and property, including orchards and vineyards, by security forces in Kaynak hamlet near the village of Yardere, Mardin Province. Following the June 1994 death of Hasan İlhan, the Commission allowed Abdülmecit İlhan to continue the application on behalf of his deceased father. Supplementary materials pertaining to this case are located at A44/43/6/45.
On or about 21 April 1992 military units attached to the Gendarme Headquarters at Mardin searched the applicant's hamlet. According to the Government, this search was performed with the aim of taking precautionary measures to protect the lives and property of the inhabitants of the village from the PKK. No military operation was taking place in the area at the time. The soldiers rounded up the villagers, threatened them and told them that they would be killed if they did not leave the hamlet. The soldiers then burned and destroyed some of the houses and barns using hand grenades, inflammable material, and pickaxes. They also killed a number of animals. The villagers whose houses had been destroyed left the hamlet and went to the nearby village of Yardere to take shelter. The soldiers returned a few days later, burned the remaining houses in the hamlet and forced the remaining villagers to leave. Sometime later, the villagers returned to their hamlet to tend their vineyards and orchards. They made tents in which to live and erected them in their vineyards and orchards. On or about 30 June 1992 members of the security forces returned to the hamlet and destroyed what was left of the houses. When the soldiers saw that the villagers would not be separated from their village, the soldiers set fire to the earth in which the vineyards and orchards were planted. The ground, crops and trees were burned using petrol, paraffin and other similar inflammable material and sometimes a powder. In the vineyard and orchard owned by the applicant, 5,000 vines, 120 peach trees, 700 fig trees, 500 almond trees, 700 apricot trees, 460 prune trees and ten thousand oak trees were burned down. The applicant owned 10 hectares of land.
After having left his hamlet and taken shelter in an empty house in the village of Yardere, the applicant sent petitions to a number of authorities, including the office of the Prime Minister, the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Defence and asked for his damages to be compensated. On 19 August 1992 he received a reply from the Prime Minister's office, stating that the application for compensation had been passed to the relevant authority and that he would be informed of the outcome by that authority in due course. No compensation was ever paid to the applicant or his family. In the early weeks of March 1993, the applicant was on his way from Mardin to the hamlet. He was stopped and searched at Akıncılar Military Post. When the replies he had received from the Government and party leaders were found on him, the applicant was thrown into the station, beaten up and abused. The soldiers burned the documents.
The Government claimed that a member of the İlhan family living in Kaynak hamlet had a hideout in the village in which weapons were found which had been used in a number of killings, and that the discovery of the hideout revealed the cooperation between that family and the PKK. According to the Government, this revelation made it difficult for the family to stay in the hamlet, probably because of fear of reprisals from the PKK for having surrendered the weapons.
On 9 November 2004, the European Court of Human Rights unanimously ruled that there had been violations of Articles 2, 8, 13, and Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The Turkish Government was ordered to pay Hasan İlhan’s estate €33,500 in pecuniary damages, €14,500 in non-pecuniary damages, and €15,000 in legal costs and expenses (less €2,652 granted in legal aid). The full judgment is available for viewing at https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng?i=001-67346.

The files in this sub-sub-series are equivalent to Tabs 1 through 7 in the legal team’s filing system, plus documents originally placed in sleeves at the front of the file.