Materials pertaining to the case filed by Abdullah Altun against the Republic of Turkey with the European Commission of Human Rights (application number 24561/94; referred to internally within the Kurdish Litigation Project as Case 117 and assigned to Kevin Boyle as lead). Early in the morning of 11 November 1993, the applicant left his house and went to the fields to work. At about 7 a.m. a large number of soldiers arrived in the village of Akdoruk, Kulp District, Diyarbakır Province on foot. The soldiers had a list of names in their hands and started burning down some of the houses. From the field, the applicant saw that his house was on fire. The applicant’s wife tried to save some of their belongings and animals however she was prevented by the gendarmes who hit her with the butt of their rifles. In all, the soldiers burned down six houses in the village.
In February 1994, Abdullah Altun went to the Kulp Magistrate’s Court together with Ahmet Altun and Mustafa Aldemir to lodge a petition about the burning of his house. All three of them submitted handwritten petitions to the judge and requested him to conduct a visit to the village to establish the damage they had suffered. The judge refused their request for security reasons. The same day, the applicant and the two other villagers were called to the public prosecutor’s office in Kulp, where they were interrogated about their complaints. The public prosecutor took their statements and typed down their complaints. Abdullah Altun, Ahmet Altun, and Mustafa Aldemir signed these petitions without understanding the content, as they were illiterate. The applicant later learnt from his friends that these petitions had been transferred to the Kulp District Gendarmerie whose officers the applicant considered responsible for the destruction of his house. He was informed that the gendarmes were looking for him however he was too frightened to go to the gendarmerie headquarters, because the other two villagers, who had also lodged a petition with him, had also been summoned to the gendarmerie and had been severely beaten. In the beginning of 1994, the gendarmes returned to the Akdoruk village and burned down the remaining houses.
On 1 June 2004, the Court ruled unanimously that there had been violations of Articles 3, 8, 13, and Article 1 of Protocol 1, of the European Convention on Human Rights, and awarded Altun €51,500 in damages, costs, and expenses. A full copy of the judgment is available for viewing at https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/?i=001-61796.
