European Court of Human Rights

SECOND SECTION

Application no. 23856/07
Hüseyin ILHAN and Others
against Turkey
lodged on 21 May 2007

STATEMENT OF FACTS

THE FACTS

The applicants, Mr Hüseyin Ilhan, Mr Hasan Ilhan, Mrs Fatma Ilhan, Mr Mustafa Ilhan, Mrs Fatma Ilhan, Mr Mehmet Ali Ilhan and Mr Memduh Ilhan, are Turkish nationals who were born in 1978, 1988, 1949, 1950, 1949, 1968 and 1919 respectively and live in Agri. Their application was lodged on 21 May 2007. They are represented before the Court by Mr Abdullah Koç, a lawyer practising in Ankara.

The circumstances of the case

The facts of the case, as submitted by the applicants and as they appear from the documents submitted by them, may be summarised as follows.

The applicants are the close relatives of Mr Mehmet Ilhan and Mr Faruk Ilhan.

On the evening of 7 April 2004 Mehmet Ilhan and Faruk Ilhan were sitting in the pharmacy owned by the former in the town of Dogubayazit, which is located within the administrative jurisdiction of the province of Agri. Mehmet Ilhan’s son, Hüseyin Ilhan, who is the first applicant, was also in the pharmacy together with Mr Erkan Esiyok, who was an employee at the pharmacy.

At around 9.30 p.m. a person walked in and opened fire with an automatic machine gun. The applicants’ relatives, Mehmet Ilhan and Faruk Ilhan, were shot and killed. The remaining persons in the pharmacy were not injured.

Police officers arrived at the scene within a very short time but the perpetrator had already fled. Mustafa Ilhan, who is the fourth applicant and the brother of Mehmet Ilhan and the father of Faruk Ilhan, asked the police officers whether the roads around the area had already been sealed off by them to catch the perpetrator. The police officers told Mr Ilhan that taking that step was not possible “at that time of the evening”.

Crime scene officers, accompanied by the local prosecutor, recovered eight spent bullet cases and four deformed bullets from the pharmacy. The bodies were transferred to the local hospital.

A post mortem examination of the two bodies was carried out the same evening. It was established that both men had been shot numerous times and the bullets had exited their bodies.

On 16 April 2004 the fourth applicant, Mustafa Ilhan, made a statement at the prosecutor’s office and asked for the perpetrator to be found. He told the prosecutor that the family had no enemies and that they had no idea why the attack had been carried out.

On 21 April 2004 the first applicant, Hüseyin Ilhan, made a statement before the prosecutor and gave the prosecutor his eyewitness account of the attack. He also described the attacker and the weapon used by the attacker.

In October 2004 the fourth applicant submitted petitions to the Prime Minister and a number of Ministries. He complained that the perpetrator had not been found. By way of reply, he received a letter from the Governor of Agri, stating that all necessary steps had been and were being taken in the investigation.

On 16 November 2005 the applicants’ legal representative sent a letter to the Prime Minister and the Ministries of the Interior and Justice. In his letter the legal representative stated, inter alia, that it was not possible to have access to all the investigation documents because the investigation file had been classified as confidential by the authorities.

In its reply addressed to the applicants’ legal representative the Ministry of Justice stated that the decision to classify the file confidential had been taken by the Dogubayazit Magistrates’ Court on 5 May 2004 at the request of the prosecutor and that the investigation was still continuing.

In his letters of 14 September 2006, 9 May 2007, 13 August 2008 and 21 April 2010 the applicants’ legal representative repeated his requests for information and documents. According to the information given to the legal representative by the Dogubayazit Prosecutor on 30 April 2010, the investigation was still continuing.

COMPLAINTS

The applicants complain under Article 2 of the Convention that, despite the fact that 13,000 persons have been killed in Turkey in a similar fashion, no sufficient steps are being taken at the national level to protect the right to life. As a result, their two relatives were killed in a well-planned attack and the perpetrator was not found.

Under Articles 6 and 13 of the Convention the applicants allege that no steps, other than a number of rudimentary ones, were taken in the investigation.

QUESTIONS TO THE PARTIES

Has the applicants’ relatives’ right to life, ensured by Article 2 of the Convention, been violated in the present case?

In particular, having regard to the procedural protection of the right to life (see paragraph 104 of Salman v. Turkey [GC], no. 21986/93, ECHR 2000-VII), was the investigation in the present case by the domestic authorities in breach of Article 2 of the Convention?

The Government are requested to submit to the Court a copy of the documents in the investigation file.