Europe as an Agent of Change: The Role of the European Court of Human Rights and the EU in Turkey’s Kurdish Policies

The commencement of talks between the Turkish government and Abdullah Öcalan in late 2012, and the PKK’s subsequent announcement of an indefinite ceasefire, has raised hopes for a peaceful solution to the conflict. Recent regional developments – with the emergence of a de facto Kurdish self-rule in Syria and the increasing likelihood of a Kurdish state in Iraq – have made Turkey’s permanent settlement of its own conflict all the more pertinent.Important as these developments are, the exclusive framing of the issue within the discourse of “conflict resolution” bears the risk of reaching faulty policy analyses that attribute too much significance to the cessation of fighting. The crux of the Kurdish issue remains the structural inequalities against the Kurds, which predate the conflict between the PKK and the Turkish military. Current debates on the Kurdish demands in the framework of the peace talks often overlook the history in which these demands were shaped, communicated and pursued, not only by the Kurdish national movement but also, and first and foremost, by the human rights activists in the Kurdish region. The legal and political mobilisation of Kurdish civil society vis-à-vis European institutions raised awareness about the human rights abuses committed by the Turkish government and framed concrete rights claims for equality, justice and the rule of law. The ECtHR and the EU, for their part, have played a critical – though not necessarily always coherent and consistent – role in the relatively significant, albeit substantively limited, reforms adopted by Turkish governments since the late 1990s. At the same time, this European engagement has not always pushed Turkey in the direction of enhancing the democratic participation and human rights of its Kurdish citizens, particularly in the post-9/11 context.This paper looks into the evolution of the trilateral relationship between Turkey, Europe and the Kurds over the course of the past three decades. Based on the current political situation in Turkey and its region, it argues that there is an imminent need for European re-engagement in the Kurdish issue in a coherent, continuous and critical manner based on a systematic political dialogue with diversified domestic actors