Until the ECtHR entered the picture, Turkey’s legal landscape lacked the basic ingredients for access to justice. Justiciable rights were subject to significant restrictions, the judiciary was unreceptive to rights claims, and civil society was weak and disorganised. Without funding, rights-advocacy organisations or pro bono legal assistance, human rights victims lacked access to a support structure. Once Turkey recognised the ECtHR’s oversight, Kurdish lawyers mobilised owing to their historically embedded rights consciousness, relatively high level of organisation and resistance experience, and the sheer scale and density of state violence. They became the top litigant group in Strasbourg in terms of the number of petitions they filed and the precedent-setting judgements they won. Based on in-depth interviews, this chapter accounts how Kurdish lawyers have mobilised the ECtHR to resist state violence in an emergency context. It shows the complex ways in which Turkey’s recognition of the right of individual petition and efforts to accede to the EU, and the ECtHR’s post-enlargement reforms have affected and been affected by Kurdish legal mobilisation since the early 1990s.

Part of the book's background chapters on the ECtHR's engagement in Turkey's Kurdish conflict, Chapter 2 seeks answers to the following puzzle: How is it that Turkey remains an authoritarian regime despite havig been part of the post-World War II international liberal democratic order? Arguing that the answer lies in the country's political history and sociological reality, it traces Turkey’s post-war tumultuous experience with electoral democracy, constitutionalism, human rights and minority protection against the backdrop of its engagement with international and European institutions, including the European Union and the Council of Europe. It argues that Turkey’s transition to polyarchy in 1950 has never translated into democratisation, which cannot be solely explained by frequent military interventions. Rather, authoritarianism has survived in Turkey due to unique social and political factors, including sustained electoral support for anti-democratic laws and policies, a tradition of a strong state immune to the internal checks of liberal democracy and the absence of a democratic culture.

Turkey is among the drafters of the European Convention on Human Rights, has been subject to the ECtHR's oversight for over three decades and is an EU accession country since 2005. Yet, it continues to engage in state violence and political repression against its Kurdish minority. Starting with a description of this puzzle, the chapter provides a review of the literature on supranational courts and legal mobilisation, highlighting the significant gap in scholarship concerning the ECtHR's failure to penetrate into Turkey's authoritarian politico-legal culture, despite decades of mobilisation by Kurdish lawyers. It explains that the book seeks to fill this gap through a process-oriented study of the ECtHR's engagement in Turkey's Kurdish conflict by drawing from methodological approaches in law, political science and sociology, and combining doctrinal legal research, semi-structured interviews, desk research and participant observation. The chapter concludes with a brief layout of the content and purpose of the remaining chapters.

Taking up from where Chapter 5 left off, this chapter shows the ECtHR’s response to Kurdish legal mobilisation against state violence in the emergency region. On the basis of a process-oriented analysis, it traces the evolution of the ECtHR’s jurisprudence on gross and systematic human rights violations in the Kurdish region and Turkey’s execution thereof. It shows how the ECtHR’s engagement in the Kurdish conflict has evolved with its acquisition of expertise on Turkey’s legal system and yet varied in response to emerging political and legal developments in Turkey and Europe. The chapter provides a detailed doctrinal analysis of each of the three phases in the ECtHR's oversight of gross violations in the Kurdish region, demonstrating that the Court's jurisprudence has been inconsistent and incoherent under the façade of judicial meticulousness and unduly deferential to the Turkish government's counterterrorism argument. It concludes that the ECtHR, even during the peak of its engagement in the Kurdish cases, refrained from making full use of its jurisprudential powers to hold Turkey accountable.

The primary indicator of authoritarianism in Turkey has been the treatment of the Kurdish minority. This chapter supports this argument with a historical overview of the evolution of the Kurdish conflict since the late Ottoman era. In response to administrative centralisation and forced cultural assimilation policies pursued by imperial and republican governments, the Kurds resorted to armed uprisings during the single-party era and to peaceful opposition following the transition to a multiparty system. The state responded with further repression in the form of forced displacement, states of exception and special criminal tribunals. This basic dynamic has remained despite the EU- and ECtHR-induced reforms. While Kurdish cultural and linguistic rights have been gradually expanded, the Kurds' political rights are still addressed in the realm of counterterrorism laws. At the same time, Turkey's Europeanisation process opened a new era in Kurdish political mobilisation, enabling the Kurds to lobby European institutions and petition the ECtHR to expand their political and cultural rights on the one hand and expand their electoral representation powers on the other.

This chapter examines the free assembly and free association case law, focusing on political parties and, to a lesser extent, trade unions. The case law on political parties shows a commitment to liberal democracy; there is a substantive democratic component as well which appears in the party dissolution cases. The chapter concludes by looking at how the free association rights support deliberative and participatory democracy especially in the context of trade unions.

This chapter discusses the scope of the right to free elections in the Convention. It explores how this is largely limited to legislatures but there are debates about the application to presidential elections and referendums. The chapters includes a discussion on globalisation and the development of the free elections case law in respect of the European Parliament.

This chapter discusses the protection of the right to vote in the Convention. It examines case law on restriction of the right to vote, in particular residence-based and nationality-based restrictions as well as the case law on voting rights of prisoners.