Series 43 - Kurdish Litigation Project

7 sub-series, 100 archive boxes

Françoise Hampson

Materials relating to the litigation against Turkey on behalf of individual Kurds in which Kevin Boyle and Françoise Hampson (the latter of whom donated this documentation) were heavily engaged in the 1990s and early 2000s via the Human Rights Centre at the University of Essex (under the banners 'Kurdish Litigation Project' or 'ECHR Litigation Project'), in collaboration with the Kurdish Human Rights Project (or KHRP, originally referred to as the Kurdistan Human Rights Project) and Diyarbakır-based lawyers associated with Turkey's Human Rights Association (İHP). The cases were brought by Turkish Kurds against Turkey, under the European Convention on Human Rights, for serious violations of human rights occurring in the east of the country, of which the applicants were victims. The litigation was unusual for a range of reasons. First, the cases were not brought only as individual cases, as the goal was to show the scale of the problems. The cases were seen as a whole. Second, they raised unusually serious human rights violations, such as targeted killings, indiscriminate killings, torture, enforced disappearances, and full-scale village destruction. Third, the failure of the Turkish judicial system meant that the European Commission of Human Rights had to conduct fact-finding hearings. Many of the cases are seen by the European Court of Human Rights as leading cases. Given the centrality of issues of peace, conflict and security to Europe, and to European and international research agenda, these unique litigation sources are of great interest. In 1998, Boyle and Hampson were co-recipients of the National Council for Civil Liberties' Lawyer of the Year honours for their work advancing human rights claims before the European Court of Human Rights. In addition to Boyle and Hampson, other legal representatives who made up the so-called 'Essex team' included Aisling Reidy, Bill Bowring, Sheldon Leader, Tony Fisher, and Nicholas Stewart.
The materials in this series can be considered to fall into four categories:
1) Materials available from other sources (i.e. the HUDOC database) such as the Commission admissibility decisions, Commission Article 31 reports, and Court judgments. These represent c. 30-35% of the total series.
2) All materials generated by the applicants' legal representatives, including original applications, any subsequent pleadings on admissibility, pleadings on the merits (after fact-finding hearings), applicants' memorials to the Court, and all correspondence from the legal representatives to the Convention institutions. These represent c. 50-55% of the series.
3) Any pleadings and correspondence submitted to the Court by anybody before 1 November 1998 and any such materials after that date except documents relating to friendly settlement negotiations. Before the 1998 merger of the Commission and Court, all materials before the Court were in the public domain. After that date, when they assumed a function previously exercised by the Commission (friendly settlement negotiations), all materials remained public except those relating to that particular function. The most important items in this category are the memorials of the Turkish Government in cases where they produced one. In many cases, they did not do so. These records represent c. 5% of the series.
4) Any material created by the Commission or the Turkish Government, including replies to donor’s correspondence. This has to remain confidential until 1  November 2073. This material represents c. 10-12% of the series.

The series is arranged into 7 sub-series: Cases, Correspondence, Court judgments, Commission reports, Verbatim records, Personal casefiles, and Background materials.

Any material created by the European Commission of Human Rights bodies or the Turkish Government, including replies to donor’s correspondence, which were not released to the European Court of Human Rights must remain confidential until 1  November 2073.

• Béarla

• Fraincis

• Tuircis

• Latin