COURT FAULTS TURKEY OVER EDITOR’S MURDER
By MARC CHAMPION
Wall Street Journal
Sept 14 2010
ISTANBUL
The European Court of Human Rights on Tuesday ruled that Turkey was
guilty of failing to protect ethnic Armenian journalist Hrant Dink
when authorities knew his assassination was imminent, and of then
failing to adequately investigate his murder.
Mr. Dink, the editor of the small, Istanbul-based Armenian-language
daily Agos, was killed with three shots to the back of the head as
he returned to the newspaper’s offices in January 2007. His murder
became a cause celèbre in Turkey, and a symbol of the state’s alleged
protection or even encouragement of nationalist extremists.
“None of the three authorities informed of the planned assassination
and its imminent realization had taken action to prevent it,” the
court found, while “no effective investigation had been carried out”
into those failures.
The decision is an embarrassment for the government of Turkey’s
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which has pledged to improve the
rights and treatment of the country’s ethnic minorities. The government
recently sought to settle with the family, after withdrawing a defense
of the state’s actions that relied on a precedent that appeared to
compare Mr. Dink’s comments aimed at reconciling Turkish and Armenian
views on the 1915 slaughter of ethnic Armenians with hate speech by
a neo-Nazi.
A spokesman for the ministry of justice didn’t return calls requesting
comment on the ruling. Turkey’s foreign ministry issued a statement
saying the government didn’t intend to appeal the court ruling,
and that “studies for implementation of Dink verdict rulings will
be done and every possible measure for preventing repeat of similar
violations will be taken.”
Mr. Dink’s family brought the case against the Turkish state at the
European court in Strasbourg. Tuesday’s ruling found for the family
on all counts, according to their lawyer Arzu Becerik, awarding Mr.
Dink’s widow ~@100,000 ($128,760) in damages.
Police launched an investigation into the young Turkish
ultranationalist who allegedly carried out the murder. They
investigated 17 others, though not the police chiefs and regional
governors the family believe were complicit in obstructing prosecution
of those responsible, Ms. Becerik said in an interview. A video taken
immediately after the assassination appeared to show police smiling
and posing with the alleged killer, Ogun Samast, a high-school dropout
then 17 years old.
The government is pursuing an alleged “deep state” organization in
a series of massive court cases. It has said it is trying to clean
up state institutions and bring them under full government control,
where for decades they had acted as a law unto themselves, on occasion
toppling elected governments. Ms. Becerik, however, said the government
needed to do more in the case of Mr. Dink.
“We will take this decision as a basis to renew our criminal complaints
[in Turkey] and take those responsible to court,” as well as demand
the current investigation be widened, said Ms. Becerik.
“These people cannot be taken to court because the regional governors
did not give permission. The governors are civil servants and they
answer to the government, which can take them to court.”
Ms. Becerik said the family hadn’t accepted the government’s offer
of an amicable settlement, partly because it came too late, but also
because a negotiation would follow in which the family would be asked
to compromise on their efforts to secure justice.
From: A. Papazian