European court condemns Turkey for punishing students over Kurdish education petition

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region (Kurdistan 24) – The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) condemned Turkey this week for violating the right to education and freedom of expression of eight college students who in 2002 demanded optional Kurdish language classes at Istanbul University where they were studying at the time.

The students, all of the Kurdish origin, told the court that upon their request they faced disciplinary sanctions that resulted in the expulsion of six of them from the University and suspension of the others for two semesters.

The University also denied them access to its facilities; college authorities branded them as terrorists and put their names on notice boards that led to shunning by their friends and other students. Some of the applicants said they were subject to criminal investigations by domestic courts.

They were among scores of students who signed a petition to the University for Kurdish classes.

Kurdistan 24’s Turkish service reported that the total number of those expelled from Istanbul University in February and March of 2002 was 32 whereas those suspended for two semesters numbered at 38.

Seven others were dismissed for one semester.

Turkish law then did not allow the teaching of the Kurdish language at any level of education in public or private institutions.

In its Tuesday ruling, available online, the Strasbourg-based ECtHR fined the Turkish state to pay the applicant students 1,500 Euros (1762 USD) as compensation for the authorities’ denial of students’ right to education and disciplinary sanctions imposed on them.

In Turkey, successive governments imposed outright bans or suppression to a great extent on the Kurdish language, spoken in the three dialects of Kurmanji, Zazaki, and Sorani (present in central Anatolia), throughout most of the 20th century Turkey since the republic’s foundation in 1923.

The efforts to erase the Kurdish language and assimilate new generations gained pace in the 1930s with the opening of boarding schools in Kurdish-majority provinces where state forces were fighting rebellions, such as in Dersim and Agri.

A military junta that deposed the civilian government in 1980 brought the harshest of measures as it criminalized the use of Kurdish in publications and music, leading to an exodus of poets and writers to European countries.

Despite a gradual ease since the early 1990s, the lifting of a ban on Kurdish names in 2000, and further liberalization under the rule of a young Justice and Development Party (AKP), the government has reverted to former practices.

Since the failed military coup attempt against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his ruling AKP in 2016, authorities have shuttered scores of Kurdish language institutes, dailies, websites, TVs, including a cartoon channel for kids that was later allowed to re-air, and other media networks.

Trustees appointed by Ankara to posts of elected pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP)-affiliated mayors have also removed Kurdish signboards, placards, statues, changed park names and ordered the closure of kindergartens teaching in Kurdish.

A school which gave parents grade reports in Kurdish was closed with a government state-of-emergency decree, recorded the US State Department’s 2016 report on global human rights practices.

Turkish remains the sole official language of the republic and that of education with the Kurds—numbering over 20 million—and other ethnic groups continuing to demand education in their mother tongue.

Editing by Karzan Sulaivany