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Trends since the Içyer Judgment

Alas for the Içyer judgment! I wish the European Court of Human Rights had waited even just a year to make this step. In the last months the assessment commissions have really started to become merciless. In Çaldere village in Silvan, for example, they made an assessment which we were satisfied with. We signed, they signed, and then just after the Içyer judgement they came back demanding to reduce the sum.
—Lawyer Mahmut Vefa, Diyarbakır, April 4, 2006

The ECtHR came to the conclusion that the Compensation Law was an effective domestic remedy on the basis of a sheaf of hundreds of conciliation decisions submitted by the government to the court. Human Rights Watch’s letter to Deputy Prime Minister Gül of February 22, 2006 acknowledged that some of the conciliation decisions gave compensation at a level that would provide realistic assistance to a returning family. Subsequent events suggest that more generous initial decisions were not signs of a reliably fair system, but elements in a cynical agenda to prevent ECtHR from issuing judgements in cases concerning compensation for house destruction. The strategy prioritized the claims of those villagers who had actions pending in Strasbourg and gave some of them relatively generous payments. Lawyer Tahir Elçi observed,

It is clear that the ECtHR claims were dealt with first. [The government] wanted to make some model decisions, and they were successful in that. [The assistant governor responsible for dealing with the Compensation Law] recently boasted that he was a good patriot and had saved many millions for the state.²⁷ The ECtHR is tactically important, because the government knows and we know that without foreign pressure we would never have got this far.²⁸

As soon as the Içyer judgment was announced, the damage assessment commissions started to issue much lower assessments, and even sought to revise the assessments that had already been made.

The case of C.S. in Lice, Diyarbakır province, is an example. In the autumn of 1993 soldiers put flammable chemicals in C.S.’s house and set it on fire, along with many other houses in Ziyaret village, near Lice. C.S. has so far been unable to return to his home. In 2005 the assessment commission made a conciliation proposal of TL 40,000 (US$26,800). C.S. accepted the offer (despite his own assessment that his loss was “not less than TL 150,000 [$100,500]”). Before the paperwork was finalized, the Içyer  decision came through. The assessment commission is now refusing to settle the claim without a new assessment. C.S.’s lawyer Habibe Deyar expressed extreme frustration, since her application on his behalf had reached an advanced stage at the ECtHR in Strasbourg. The Içyer  decision not only derailed that application, but also encouraged the assessment commission to seek to haggle down their existing offer under the Compensation Law. “The officials at the damage assessment commission said that the figures were very high and asked to measure the property again—and probably the figures will come out lower.”²⁹ C.S. shared his lawyer’s disappointment: “We believed in the European Court of Human Rights and that’s why we applied to it. We hoped for something from them. You know… some justice.”³⁰

The lawyer Habibe Deyar reported that agreement had been reached in 40 of her cases, and the decisions signed by the damage assessment commission, the deputy governor, and the plaintiff. After the Içyer decision the commission took advantage of the changed circumstances, and instead of submitting these agreed conciliations for signature by the governor—the last step before processing and payment—set aside the offer pending a new, lower agreement in most of the cases.³¹

Lawyer F.L. represents the Diyarbakır Bar Association on one of the damage assessment commissions in that province. He reported that, after January 2006, the commission seemed to lose its sense of urgency, and began to make lower payments: “I saw the level of conciliation payments go down after the famous ECtHR Içyer judgment. I started in December 2005. In the first month we did six or eight meetings, but in the past month we have not had a single meeting. I cannot say what the reason for this was, but it makes one doubtful, and it looks as if that judgment had an effect. After that judgment the approach in calculating the loss of trees, for example, seemed to be more restrictive. The ECtHR judgment has strengthened the hand of the government.”³²

Lawyer Mehmet Kaya also observed the slowing down of the work of the commissions,³³ and a fall in the level of payments:

Before the ECtHR decision, the treasury sent monthly payments to provincial governors to enable conciliation payments to be made. Since [the decision] they have only sent one payment. In 2005, when the commission made its assessments, compensation for a person deprived of access to their land was set at TL 75 per decare and TL 100 per decare for irrigated land.³⁴ This year they are paying TL 25 and TL 45 respectively. They have cut the unit for calculating the evaluations. It is not clear where they get the basis for the decisions. Before the Içyer decision we used to discuss the claims with the commission, but now they just give us a computer printout, and we have no opportunity to discuss or argue the application.³⁵

The same lawyer went on to quantify the change with illustrations from three Diyarbakır villages: In Gömeç village, near Hani, the average payment made before the Içyer decision to each of 110 households was TL 22,000 ($14,740). In Şaklat village, Kocaköy, payment made before the Içyer decision to each of 192 households was TL 33,000 ($22,110). At Güldiken village, near Lice, by contrast, the survey and conciliation proposals were made out after the Içyer judgment, and the offers to 250 households averaged TL 8,000 [$5,360]—a more than fourfold decrease from the Şaklat example.

The drop in payments is not restricted to Diyarbakır province. Lawyer Sabri Erik reported that in Bingöl province, villagers deprived of access to their land had been receiving TL 75 per decare in 2005, but that after the Içyer  decision it had fallen, first to TL 50, and by April 2006 to TL 25 per decare. “Last year they were giving TL 20,000 [$13,400] as compensation for a destroyed house. Now they give from TL 8,000 to 10,000,” Erik said.³⁶

The figures on the left are from a list of conciliation settlements proposed at Şaklat village, Kocaköy, Diyarbakır, prior to the Içyer  judgment. The figures on the right are conciliation settlements offered after the Içyer judgment to villagers of Güldiken village, Lice, Diyarbakır. The villages are broadly comparable from the size of holdings and quality of land and housing, and both were destroyed by security forces in 1993, yet the general levels of proposed settlements are visibly lower in the post-Içyer settlements.