Background
Abdulvahap Timurtaş, born in 1962, was a man from Cizre. In summer 1993 the Silopi district of Şırnak and its surroundings saw intense security operations because of their closeness to the Iraqi and Syrian borders. During this period many people were detained and disappeared, and Timurtaş's case was brought before the European Court of Human Rights as one of these disappearance files.
What happened
Timurtaş was apprehended on 14 August 1993 near Yeniköy, in Silopi, together with a Syrian national, by soldiers attached to the Silopi district gendarmerie. Others who were later held said they saw him in custody for at least 45 days. The Court also noted that at the time he disappeared Timurtaş was wanted by the authorities for alleged PKK activity.
His father, Mehmet Timurtaş, asked the Silopi prosecutor about his son's fate in October 1993. The gendarmerie command replied that Abdulvahap had not been detained and that his name was not in its records. The prosecutor closed the file.
Legal proceedings
With no result in domestic law, the family applied first to the European Commission of Human Rights and then to the Court. On 13 June 2000 the Court held that Timurtaş must be presumed dead following a long period of unacknowledged detention. It found violations of the right to life (Article 2), the right to liberty (Article 5) and the right to an effective remedy (Article 13), and also of Article 3 because of the suffering of his father. The Court stressed that the time elapsed is not decisive on its own, but is relevant in presuming the death of a disappeared person.
The Court awarded compensation, but Abdulvahap Timurtaş's fate, his remains and those responsible have still not been clarified.
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 Timurtaş v. Turkey judgment is cited among the rulings reinforcing the principle that death can be presumed after unacknowledged detention in enforced disappearance cases of the 1990s. His family and human rights groups continue to call for Timurtaş's fate to be disclosed.
For the family, the passing of decades since the disappearance means that the pain and uncertainty continue. Files like this are also cited as examples where the state's responsibility was established not through a domestic criminal trial but through an international court judgment.