Background
Ahmet Çakıcı was a 37-year-old farmer and father of seven living in the village of Çitlibahçe (Helhel) in the Hazro district of Diyarbakır. In autumn 1993, security operations against villages in the south-east were becoming more frequent, and in this period many people disappeared after being detained. Çakıcı's case became one of the important enforced disappearance cases decided by the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights.
What happened
Ahmet Çakıcı was detained by soldiers in front of his family and neighbours during an operation in the village on 8 November 1993. According to witnesses, he was taken first to Hazro and then to the Diyarbakır Provincial Gendarmerie Command; in early 1994 he was said to be held at Kavaklıboğaz. A witness held in the same place described Çakıcı being ill-treated there.
The authorities said Çakıcı had never been detained, and his name did not appear in official records. The government argued that he was a militant killed in a later clash; the Court did not find that account supported by the evidence.
Legal proceedings
With no result through domestic remedies, the family went to Strasbourg; the application was brought by Ahmet's brother, İzzet Çakıcı, on his own behalf and on behalf of his brother. On 8 July 1999 the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights held that it could be taken as established that Çakıcı had died following his detention by the security forces. It found violations of the right to life (Article 2), the prohibition of ill-treatment (Article 3), the right to liberty (Article 5) and the right to an effective remedy (Article 13). The Article 3 violation concerned Ahmet's treatment in custody; the Court also noted that not every relative of a disappeared person is automatically a victim under that article.
To date no investigation or prosecution has produced a result, and Çakıcı remains missing.
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
The Çakıcı v. Turkey judgment is among the precedents showing that death in enforced disappearance cases can be established through circumstantial evidence. The file is one of the examples in which the relatives' demand to know the truth and see those responsible tried has gone unmet even after three decades.
For the Çakıcı family the case became a rare instance in which what happened in Çitlibahçe was officially recorded, yet the demands for those responsible to be tried and for the body to be found still go unanswered.