Sub-sub-series 6 - Kurdish Human Rights Project correspondence

4 files

Correspondence pertaining to the Kurdish Human Rights Project (originally the Kurdistan Human Rights Project; the name was changed in 1994 to counter the Turkish Government's claim that the organisation's underlying aim was the establishment of a Kurdish state). Kevin Boyle and Françoise Hampson served as the original counsellors for the KHRP. The KHRP was established in 1992 (with the help of the University of Essex) in response to the genocide, war crimes and human rights violations occurring across the Kurdish regions of Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria, the Caucasus and elsewhere. Prominent members of the Kurdish community and diaspora sought the assistance of human rights defenders, legal experts and academics in Britain. The executive director of the KHRP was Kerim Yıldız, a Kurdish refugee, human rights postgraduate and former student of Boyle and Hampson. The Kurdish Human Rights Project (KHRP) was born out of Yıldız’s encounters with Boyle and Hampson. According to Bill Bowring, a British attorney involved in the KHRP’s founding, this was Hampson’s and Boyle’s project, while Yıldız says that the decision to establish the organization was made by himself and Boyle during a trip to Strasbourg. Mark Muller, a British human rights barrister, encouraged dozens more leading figures in the human rights community to join. Soon, a network of leading lawyers willing to undertake pro bono cases to the European Court of Human Rights was founded. They began submitting urgent action appeals and submissions to the European Commission on Human Rights, OSCE and several UN mechanisms. Together with Diyarbakır-based Kurdish lawyers associated with Turkey's Human Rights Association (İHD) (led by Sedat Aslantaş and later Mahmut Şakar) who had already been litigating cases through the ECHR since 1989 and who provided the on-the-ground Turkish legal expertise for the project and face-to-face representation for applicants, the KHRP, Boyle, and Hampson submitted over 200 applications on behalf of Turkish Kurds to the ECHR, of which over 70 were litigated. As early as 1993, the relationship between Yıldız, Boyle, and Hampson began to break down, ultimately leading to the latter duo exiting the KHRP in 1996. Boyle and Hampson continued Kurdish/ECHR litigation at the University of Essex Human Rights Centre (the 'Essex team'). The remaining British lawyers stayed with Yıldız at the KHRP. Over the course of the 2000s as the İHD-associated lawyers gained expertise litigating within the ECHR system, and as the Court became more hesitant to hear Kurdish cases, the KHRP gradually phased out its activities and closed down in 2010.