Jailed Kurdish MPs awarded damages by European court

Leyla Zana and 12 other Kurdish MPs who have been in Turkish prisons since 1994 were each awarded €50,000 (£33,000) in damages by the European Court of Human Rights yesterday. In a damning verdict, the court ruled that Turkey had violated the basic principles of democracy.

When Turkey is trying to improve its human rights image, yesterday's decision comes as a blow. The court ruled that Turkey had violated the human right to free elections when it stripped the Kurdish MPs of their membership of parliament because they belonged to a pro-Kurdish party.

"The jailers who lock my body behind the thick walls of an Ankara prison do not have the power to prevent my spirit from travelling freely," Ms Zana once said. Her case came to symbolise the plight of Turkey's Kurdish minority. Turkey refuses to recognise its 12 million Kurds as a minority and restricts the use of their language. Kurdish areas are under emergency military rule.

Ms Zana, the first Kurdish woman to be elected to Turkey's parliament, was howled down with cries of "Traitor" and "Arrest her" from other MPs when she took her oath of office in 1991, and added a few words in Kurdish. What she said was: "I shall struggle so that the Kurdish and Turkish people may live peacefully together in a democratic framework."

In 1994, the Turkish authorities closed down the pro-Kurdish Democracy Party of which Ms Zana was a member, accusing it of separatism, and arrested her and several other MPs from the party. They were put on trial for treason. Those charges were later reduced to membership of an illegal armed group.

An additional charge against Ms Zana was wearing the Kurdish colours of red, yellow and green, which was considered a crime.

Ms Zana and the other MPs were each sentenced to 15 years in prison. The human rights court had already ruled, in a separate decision last year, that that trial was unfair. Some of those who testified against the accused MPs later said they had lied, and their statements had been extracted under torture.

While Ms Zana and the other party members lost their liberty, millions of Kurdish voters lost the MPs they had chosen. As soon as the Democracy Party was closed, Ms Zana and the other MPs were stripped of their membership of parliament. The court ruled yesterday that that decision "was incompatible with the very essence of the right to stand for election" and "infringed the unfettered discretion of the electorate which had elected the applicants".

The court award of €50,000 to each of the 13 Kurdish MPs is a particularly damning ruling for Turkey. But the chances are it will do little to end Ms Zana's prison sentence. The Court of Human Rights does not go so far as to demand that unfair sentences are overturned. Its ruling that her prison sentence was unfair came last July – but Ms Zana is still behind bars.

Devlet Bahceli, Turkey's Deputy Prime Minister, offered little hope of early reform yesterday. He said Turkey would not be able to enter the European Union for another decade, and therefore had no need to push through EU-demanded human rights reforms.