File 80 - Selahattin Şimşek

5 sub-files

Materials pertaining to the case filed by Selahattin Şimşek on 26 June 1993 against the Republic of Turkey with the European Commission of Human Rights (application number 22490/93, referred to internally within the Kurdish Litigation Project as Case 65 and assigned to Tony Fisher as lead). Şimşek was a death row prisoner, a former primary school teacher arrested in 1980 by the Turkish Government of working for the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) and incarcerated since then. Şimşek was sentenced to death on 24 May 1983. A 27 January 1993 judgment of the Constitutional Court of Turkey commuted the sentences of death row prisoners convicted under the Anti-Terror Law to 10 years, which would theoretically make Şimşek eligible for release as he had already served 13 years in prison. Şimşek’s sentence, however, was only commuted to 20 years, which he argued was based upon his Kurdish ethnicity. On 2 March 1994, the Commission found the application to be manifestly ill-founded and declared the application inadmissible.
Materials in this file include: 1) correspondence between Tony Fisher, Kevin Boyle, the Kurdish Human Rights Project, and Amnesty International preparing the case for application; 2) documents obtained from Turkey pertaining to Şimşek’s imprisonment; 3) reports published by non-government organisations (particularly Amnesty International and the Human Rights Association) pertaining to political prisoners under detainment in Turkey; and 4) the application submitted to the Commission on 26 June 1993 including appendices. The decision of inadmissibility (5) published by the Commission is closed to access until 1 November 2073.

The decision of inadmissibility published by the European Commission of Human Rights (A44/43/6/80/5) is closed to access until 1 November 2073.

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