Materials pertaining to the case filed by Yavuz Binbay on 11 April 1994 against the Republic of Turkey with the European Commission of Human Rights (application number 24922/94, referred to internally within the Kurdish Litigation Project as Case 30 and assigned to Bill Bowring as lead, later replaced by Anke Stock of the Kurdish Human Rights Project) regarding repeated violence and intimidation against himself and his property committed by Turkish authorities or with their connivance between 21 March 1992 and 11 February 1994 on account of his activities in the Human Rights Association and his Kurdish origin.
Binbay was a shopkeeper at the time of the events giving rise to the application as well as the president of the Van branch of the Human Rights Association and a member of the Association’s National Management Committee. On 21 March 1992, during the Newroz Festival, incidents occurred in Van which eventually led to a curfew being imposed. The applicant alleges that he was severely beaten outside the office of the People’s Labour Party (HEP) by police officers. He spent nine days in hospital. Following his discharge from hospital, he was charged with public order offences and detained on remand. He was eventually acquitted for lack of evidence. Also on 21 March 1992, Binbay’s shop was raided, the only shop out of 22 on the same floor to be raided. Goods and equipment in the shop were damaged or stolen. His subsequent claim for compensation was rejected by the Van Administrative Court. On 30 August 1992, Binbay’s car was damaged while parked opposite his house in Van. Between 5 November 1993 and 13 January 1994, Binbay was taken into custody on three separate occasions. According to the applicant, he and his family received threatening and abusive telephone calls, sometimes three a day, ordering him to leave Van or be killed. On 11 February 1994 the applicant was attacked by two men who followed him on his way to a meeting at a friend’s office. When he recovered consciousness, he found himself in a lift-shaft. He sustained serious injuries. According to Binbay, the police did not follow-up this incident. After his discharge from hospital, Binbay received telephone calls warning him that he would not escape the next time.
The Government maintained that there were illegal demonstrations, violence and looting in Van on 21 March 1992, and that Binbay was injured by stone-throwing demonstrators when he emerged from the HEP building where he had taken shelter. He was rescued from the crowd by the police and taken to hospital. He was later charged with, inter alia, organising the illegal demonstration and eventually acquitted. As to the lift-shaft incident of 11 February 1994, the Government stated that the police questioned the applicant on two occasions in connection with the incident, but he refused to provide them with any information. Accordingly, the police were unable to make any progress in their investigation. The Government denied that the applicant had ever been subject to arbitrary arrest. They refuted his claims that the authorities had been involved, either directly or indirectly, in any of the various incidents described by him and maintained that he had failed to exhaust domestic remedies in connection with his allegations.
On 23 June 2004, a friendly settlement was reached in which the Turkish Government paid Binbay €45,000 for pecuniary and non-pecuniary damages and ‘accepted that acts of serious assault, intimidation or harassment, including by means of arbitrary detention and damage to property, and the authorities’ failure to investigate these matters, as claimed in the instant case, constitute a violation of Articles 3, 5 and 13 of the Convention and Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 to the Convention.’ The full judgment is available for viewing at https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng?i=001-67153
