The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) ruled on Tuesday that Turkey violated the rights of a man who lost an eye during the police response to a 2013 May Day protest in İstanbul by refusing to investigate the role of the city’s then-governor and police chief, Turkish Minute reported.
The case concerns İbrahim Akan, who was hit in the left eye by a tear gas canister on May 1, 2013, during a large police operation that blocked access to İstanbul’s Taksim Square, a symbolic site for Labor Day rallies in Turkey’s largest city.
Akan later underwent surgery but lost his eye and was assessed as partially disabled. Turkey’s Constitutional Court and administrative courts had already found that police used excessive force and that the investigation into frontline officers was inadequate, awarding him compensation under domestic law.
The Strasbourg court looked instead at whether authorities fulfilled their duty to investigate possible responsibility at the top of the chain of command, including the governor of İstanbul and the head of the İstanbul police, who ordered the May Day operation.
Under Turkey’s Law No. 4483, prosecutors need prior authorization from the interior ministry to open criminal cases against most senior public officials for acts carried out while in office, and the ministry in 2013 refused to allow any investigation into the two men.
The European court said Turkey could not shift the burden onto Akan to prove that these officials had ordered unlawful force and held that the state had an obligation to examine whether there were shortcomings in the planning and organization of the police intervention that led to his injury.
It found that no such investigation was carried out because the authorization system under Law No. 4483 blocked it at the outset and ruled that this violated the procedural section of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which requires an effective official investigation into credible claims of ill-treatment by state agents.
The court awarded Akan 12,500 euros in non-pecuniary damages for the failure to investigate senior officials and 1,000 euros for costs and expenses, on top of the sums already granted by Turkish courts for his physical injury.
