RUE DE LA PRESSE 5

B-1000 BRUSSELS

PRESS AND INFORMATION SERVICE

Section "Religious Intolerance and Discrimination"

December 9, 1998

TURKEY

SYRIAN CHRISTIAN PRISONER'S CASE GOES TO STRASBOURG

HRWF (09.12.98) - The restructuring of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) put into effect November 4 is expected to speed up Syrian Christian Soner Onder's chances of having his case reviewed by a neutral judicial body outside his native Turkey.

Otherwise, Onder faces another five and one-half years in a high-security military prison cell, marked as a political prisoner aligned with the terrorist activities of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).

A 17-year-old youth at the time of his arrest in December 1991, Onder was accused of participating in a firebombing attack on an Istanbul department store in which 12 people were killed by PKK separatists. Despite clearcut testimony contradicting the incriminating police report, as well as an

official medical report verifying his claims that torture was used to extort a false confession, he was convicted and handed a death sentence, later commuted to life in prison.

An affidavit from the Syrian Orthodox Metropolitan of Istanbul confirming Onder's attendance at Christmas Day church services just prior to the December 25 attack was ignored by the Turkish courts. Nor was evidence produced that Onder had any links with the PKK.

Now almost 25, he has already spent seven years behind bars. His sentence was eventually reduced to 16 years and eight months because he was less than 18 years of age at the time of his arrest. The Turkish penal code forbids the death penalty against minors. He would be eligible for parole after serving three-fourths of his sentence, a total of 12 years and six months.

After exhausting all possible judicial appeals through the Turkish State Security Courts and the Supreme Court, Onder's Turkish human rights lawyer Hasip Kaplan filed an appeal last January before the ECHR in Strasbourg. Kaplan is optimistic that the court's newly-streamlined hearing procedures should bring up Onder's case for consideration during 1999.

"I am hoping for an unprejudiced decision from the European Court," Onder told relatives during a special family visit granted at Bayrampasa Prison the last weekend in October, on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the Turkish Republic.

Normally incarcerated in Istanbul's Umraniye Military Prison, Onder had been admitted to a hospital for minor surgery in mid October, just days before a prison uprising broke out among his fellow political prisoners. Family members admitted they were "relieved" that he was still recuperating in the hospital ward of Bayrampasa Prison during the one-day protest October 24. The youth had suffered serious head injuries during a crackdown by Umraniye prison guards in December 1995 in which several inmates were killed.

ECHR proceedings are conducted in English and French, requiring all documents concerning Onder's case to be translated into both languages. Kaplan, who said he lacked fluency in either of these languages, hopes to be assisted by a European lawyer at the Strasbourg hearing of the case.

Onder's family believe the youth was arrested simply because his identity card revealed that he was born in Diyarbakir, a major city in the heavily Kurdish-populated southeast region of Turkey. Separatist forces of the PKK have been fighting with government troops in the region since 1984, at the cost of more than 30,000 lives.

"Our whole family is awaiting a positive result from Strasbourg in the shortest possible time", Onder's brother Teoman Onder told Compass last month.

The latest ECHR reforms enacted November 4 require the court to function full-time, eliminating the cumbersome backlog of cases from the 1992 policy under which the Human Rights Commission spent a week of every month working separately from the court.

As the judicial body of the Council of Europe, the ECHR is authorized to hear appeals from private citizens of member nations, once all internal legal avenues have been exhausted. Onder's case qualified for consideration after his final appeal before the Turkish Supreme Court was rejected in December 1997.

Turkey has a record 2,400 cases on file before the ECHR, the largest number from any member nation. However, less than 10 percent are accepted for formal review: only 29 of the 365 cases filed from Turkey during 1997 were accepted.

The Turkish government remains at odds with the ECHR over an array of rulings against Turkey, the majority related to cases involving the Kurdish separatist struggle. In early November, the Turkish Justice Minister criticized recent ECHR rulings, claiming the court's "biased rulings" were being used to exert political pressure against Turkey. Turkey has threatened to suspend its membership in the Council of Europe, which would freeze its implementation of the court's rulings.

Onder's elderly mother and all but two fo his eight older siblings have immigrated to Europe, part of the Syrian Christian diaspora from Southeast Turkey where they were born. Numbering some 70,000 in the 1930s, less than 2,000 of the ancient community remain in the war-torn region, which still boasts the oldest Christian monastery in the world at Tur Abdin.