This week the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe – or more accurately the deputies appointed by the foreign ministers of the member nations – will discuss how to respond to Turkey’s failure to implement key judgements of the European Court of Human Rights. The cases they will look at include Turkey’s refusal to allow the possibility of parole for prisoners serving aggravated life sentences – which, the court has ruled, denies those prisoner the fundamental Right to Hope – and also Turkey’s refusal to release from detention, as demanded by the Court, the former co-chairs of the leftist, pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democracy Party (HDP).
The Right to Hope case specifically relates to Abdullah Öcalan and the other prisoners in İmralı, but also affects an estimated 4,000 further prisoners. (Turkey has failed to respond to the Court’s demand to give exact numbers.) To comply with the European Charter of Human Rights, a prison system must include a mechanism for reviewing a prisoner’s detention after a certain number of years, and the possibility of release, though that release is not guaranteed.
The European Court made its ruling on Öcalan’s case in 2014. It’s rulings override national courts and have to be obeyed. However, mechanisms for enforcement are very weak and limited. The Committee of Ministers, or of ministers’ deputies, discusses these cases, but has few tools with which to respond. Member states that defy the Council of Europe’s rules can be thrown out of the organisation all together, as happened to Russia, but this is a last resort that removes the state from the Council’s influence completely. Short of this, the state can be temporarily restricted in what it can do in the Council, with sanctions on debates or voting.
European states do not want to antagonise Turkey, and they have avoided this through repeated delays. It wasn’t until September 2021 that the Committee first discussed Turkey’s refusal to accept the court’s decision. They then gave Turkey a deadline of September 2022 by which to respond, and Turkey underlined their contempt for the court by responding a month late with an ‘action plan’ that did not address the court’s demands. The committee then instructed them to submit another plan, which Turkey sent in July: but this is no better.
A fundamental right, such as the Right to Hope, allows of no exceptions; but the Turkish government admits that Turkish law does make an exception to the rule of conditional release for aggravated life sentences. They then argue that this is OK because it is ‘very limited and exceptional’ and used ‘for only the most serious offences’. These ‘serious offences’ include terrorist crimes against the constitutional order, which seems to be a very elastic category – hence the growing numbers affected.
The Committee should publish the result of their deliberations on Friday, and while Kurds everywhere will be watching what happens, further delays are vey possible. But we go on hoping – and actively campaigning – for the Right to Hope.