Background
Üzeyir Kurt lived in 1993 in the village of Ağıllı, in the Bismil district of Diyarbakır. In those years, clashes between security forces and the PKK in south-eastern Turkey reached into villages, and many villages saw operations and forced evacuations. During this period many people disappeared after being detained and were never heard from again. Kurt's case became one of the first and best-known enforced disappearance cases brought before the European Court of Human Rights.
What happened
According to the application by Kurt's mother, Koçeri Kurt, soldiers gathered the villagers in the school yard around noon on 24 November 1993 and looked for Üzeyir. When he was not found, the soldiers went to the house of a relative and took him from there. The application says that Üzeyir spent the night in the village with soldiers and that his mother last saw him on 25 November surrounded by soldiers and village guards, with bruises on his face. Nothing more was heard of him.
The authorities denied that Kurt had been detained. In an official prosecutorial decision, the view was expressed that the PKK might have been responsible, and the Bismil prosecutor issued a decision of non-jurisdiction on 21 March 1994. The villagers later left the village and moved to Bismil.
Legal proceedings
Having obtained no result through domestic channels, the family applied to the European Commission of Human Rights. In its judgment of 25 May 1998, the Court accepted that Kurt had been held by state forces but said there was no conclusive evidence of his death, so it did not find a violation of Article 2. It did find, under Article 5, that holding someone without recording the detention is one of the most serious violations of the right to liberty. It also found a violation of Article 13 because no investigation was carried out, and of Article 3 because of the anguish his mother suffered through years of uncertainty and official indifference.
The judgment is regarded as an important precedent for protecting the rights of both the disappeared and their relatives in enforced disappearance cases.
In such cases the European Court of Human Rights treats the absence of a plausible explanation from the authorities as one of the grounds for presuming death, even when no body has been found, where a person was last in the hands of state officials and nothing has been heard since. The same judgments remind the state of its duty to investigate disappearance claims promptly and effectively. This principle has become one of the main reference points in the legal framework for the disappearance files from south-eastern Turkey in the 1990s.
Where it stands today
Üzeyir Kurt's fate is still unknown. The Kurt v. Turkey judgment is often cited as a reminder of Turkey's obligation to carry out effective investigations into disappearances and is one of the legal foundations used by relatives of the disappeared in their search for justice.
For the Kurt family the judgment meant an international court recognised what they had gone through during years of uncertainty, yet the question of where Üzeyir is remains unanswered.