ECHR Article 8-1
Respect for correspondence
Respect for family life
Restriction on Turkish prisoners using Kurdish when telephoning: violation
Facts – During their imprisonment, the applicants were prevented by the prison authorities from conducting telephone conversations in Kurdish with their relatives. Their appeals against those restrictions were dismissed.
Law – Article 8: The restriction imposed on the applicants’ telephone communications with their families, on the ground that they wished to conduct their conversations in Kurdish, could be regarded as an interference with their right to respect for their family life and correspondence for the purposes of Article 8 – 1 of the Convention. The question at issue concerned not the applicants’ freedom to use a language as such, but their right to maintain meaningful contact with their families. As recommended in the European Prison Rules* of 2006, it was essential for the prison authorities to help inmates maintain contact with their close relatives. In the present case, domestic law allowed prisoners to maintain contact with the outside world by means of telephone conversations. Those conversations could, however, for security reasons, be monitored by the prison authorities, and to ensure effective supervision the inmates were required, in principle, to speak only in Turkish during such conversations. Admittedly, Turkish law did provide for exceptions to this principle and did not contain any provision prohibiting the use of a language other than Turkish. This possibility was, however, subject to certain formal requirements, such as a procedure whereby the prison authorities could verify that the person to whom the inmate wished to speak really could not understand Turkish. In addition, it transpired from the rules then in force and from the decisions of the national authorities that the cost of this verification was charged to the inmates concerned.
The Court had, admittedly, found previously that particular security concerns – such as preventing the risk of escape – could justify the application of a specific detention regime entailing a ban on correspondence between an inmate and his family in the language of his choosing, where it had not been established that the inmate could not use one of the authorised languages. That being said, in the circumstances of the present case, the regulations in question applied generally and without distinction to all inmates, regardless of any individual assessment of security requirements that could be justified by the personality of each inmate or the offences justifying his or her detention. In addition, the national authorities had not been unaware, when examining the requests by the applicants to conduct their telephone conversations in Kurdish, that this language was among those commonly spoken in Turkey and was used by some inmates to communicate with their families. Despite this, they did not appear to have envisaged a translation system. It was essential, in terms of respect for family life, for the prison authorities to help inmates maintain real contact with their close relatives. In this connection, the inmates’ assertion that Kurdish was the language used in their family relations, and was the only language understood by their relatives, could not be called into question. The Court found this fact to be of significance in the present case.
Thus, the practice whereby applicants who had expressed the wish to use Kurdish on the telephone to members of their family were subjected to a preliminary procedure to verify whether they were really unable to speak Turkish, was not based on relevant or sufficient reasons, in the light of the restriction thus imposed on the applicants in their contacts with their families. The interference with the applicants’ right to conduct telephone conversations in Kurdish with their family members could not therefore be regarded as necessary. This was confirmed by the fact that there had subsequently been a change to Article 88/2 p) of the Rules amending the conditions in which requests were made for permission to conduct telephone conversations in a language other than Turkish. Henceforth, just a signed statement to the effect that the inmate or the relevant family members did not speak Turkish would be sufficient.
Conclusion: violation (five votes to two).
Article 41: EUR 300 to each applicant in respect of non-pecuniary damage.
60915/08 – Legal Summary, [2014] ECHR 717, 43750/06, 43752/06, 32054/08, 37753/08
Bailii
European Convention on Human Rights
Human Rights
Updated: 16 December 2021; Ref: scu.533840
