Materials pertaining to the case filed by Celalettin Yöyler on 4 April 1995 against the Republic of Turkey with the European Commission of Human Rights (application number 26973/95, referred to internally within the Kurdish Litigation Project as 177 and assigned to Kevin Boyle as lead) regarding the destruction of his home and possessions in Dirimpınar, Malazgirt District, Muş Province by Turkish security forces on 18 September 1994. Supplementary materials pertaining to this case are located at A44/43/6/98.
Until June 1994 Yöyler lived in the village of Dirimpınar. Between 1966 and 1994 he was the imam (religious leader) of the village. As a result of his involvement with a number of political organisations, including the Social Democratic Populist Party (SHP), the People's Labour Party (HEP) and the Democracy Party (DEP), of which he became the local leader, he was imprisoned on a number of occasions. The applicant left and had never returned to his village prior to the alleged events in question, since he had been threatened with death. In 1994 three young women from the village, all of whom were related to the applicant's extended family, decided to join the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party). On 15 September 1994 the gendarme unit commander of Malazgirt came to the village and threatened to burn the village to the ground if the women were not brought to him within three days. On 17 September 1994, the applicant's family and the families of the young women, frightened by this threat, loaded up their possessions and fled. However, the gendarmes, accompanied by special teams, forced them to return to the village and to unload their possessions. They gathered the families into a house by force, where they assaulted certain of them, including the applicant's wife. They withdrew from the village telling the villagers to take good photographs of their houses, as that was all they would have to remember them by. On 18 September 1994, at 8 p.m., special gendarme teams and village guards came to the village. Villagers were ordered to go into their homes and to turn off their lamps. The security forces then took diesel oil from the villagers' tractors and barrels and set fire to the houses of the applicant and his family. The applicant was out of the village, in İzmir, when his house was burned down.
On 24 July 2003, the European Court of Human Rights ruled unanimously that there had been violations of Articles 3, 8, and 13, and Article 1 of Protocol No. 1, of the European Convention on Human Rights, and that there had been no violation of Articles 14 and 18 of the Convention. The Turkish Government was ordered to pay Celalettin Yöyler €25,000 in pecuniary damages, €14,500 in non-pecuniary damages, and €14,700 in legal fees and expenses (less €355 received in legal aid). The full judgment is available for viewing at https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/?i=001-61264
