Sub-sub-series 24 - Mahmut Demir and Sıddık Yaşa

17 files

Materials pertaining to the settlement of cases filed by Mahmut Demir and Sıddık Yaşa on 21 June 1993 against the Republic of Turkey with the European Commission of Human Rights (application numbers 22280/93 and 22281/93, referred to internally within the Kurdish Litigation Project as Cases 42 and 43 and assigned to Bill Bowring as lead) regarding the deaths of their family which occurred during a military operation carried out in their village, as well as the destruction of Demir's father's home and the absence of an effective investigation on this subject. Yaşa's surname was originally given as 'Yaşar' on the application; this would not be corrected until the case hearing of November 1996.
On 17 December 1992, an armed group belonging to the PKK ambushed a civilian minibus. The passengers were forced to get off the minibus and one of them, working on behalf of the state as a village guard, was executed immediately. On 19 December 1992, soldiers accompanied by village guards burst into the village of Tepecik, where Mahmut Demir’s family lived. Four grenades were thrown inside the house of Yusuf Demir, the applicant's father. There were three explosions; the applicant's nieces, Dilek and Dilan Demir, died there and his father was seriously injured. Another soldier threw a grenade inside Sıddık Yaşa's house while he was away. The applicant's wife, Yezal Yaşa, and his son, Veysi Yaşa, were killed there, as were several other villagers. The villagers, including the applicants, having lost their homes and property, were forced to leave Tepecik. No family was allowed to bury the bodies of their loved ones in the village; these were brought and buried in Diyarbakır. A criminal investigation appears to have been initiated ex officio into the events in this case. However, the European Court of Human Rights did not receive information as to its outcome.
On 5 December 2002, a friendly settlement was reached in which the Turkish Government paid Demir and Yaşa £116,000 sterling and £89,000 sterling in damages, respectively, and declared ‘that the occurrence of deaths and of grievous injury in the present case and the inadequate investigations that followed constituted a violation of Articles 2 and 13 of the Convention.’ The full judgment (in French) is available for viewing at https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng?i=001-65367.

The files in this sub-sub-series are equivalent to Tabs 1 through 14 in the legal team’s filing system from the initial casefile binder, plus the two tabs which comprised the contents of the second casefile binder and adhesive notes from the inside front cover of the casefile binder.