Human rights issues could stall Turkey’s efforts

TONY BLAIR, in a speech to a joint meeting of Congress in Washington (the Irish Examiner, July 18) said: “If you engage in the systematic and gross abuse of human rights in defiance of the UN charter, you cannot expect to enjoy the same privileges as those that conform to it.”

We are just wondering if Turkey is also included in Mr Blair’s speech? The European Court of Human Rights ruled Leyla Zana’s trial unfair in July 2001. In its bid for membership in the European Union, the Turkish government adopted numerous reforms in August 2002, among them the right of Turkish citizens to judicial review of any verdict in a trial judged unfair by the European Court of Human Rights. But the new law specifies that it is not retroactive, preventing Leyla Zana from invoking it.

In May, the Committee of Ministers publicly and strongly urged Turkey to comply with its “repeated demands” to respond to the July 2001 ruling of the European Court of Human Rights, which found that Kurdish former parliamentary deputies Hatip Dicle, Orhan Dogan, Selim Sadak, and Leyla Zana had been sentenced to 15 years of imprisonment in 1994 after an unfair trial.