Mansur PAD and Others Vs.Turkey

58. Furthermore, the Iranian authorities had claimed compensation from the Turkish Government at the request of the applicants. The Turkish authorities had paid USD 175,000 in order to maintain good relations. This amount had been received by the Iranian authorities on behalf of the applicants and a friendly settlement had been reached between the parties. The applicants had refused to accept the compensation in order to pursue their application before the Court. Contrary to the applicants’ allegations, the Turkish Government had not offered compensation of their own motion. Nor had they exerted any pressure on the applicants in order to force them to accept the compensation in question.
(b) The applicants
59. The applicants claimed that they were absolved from their duty to exhaust domestic remedies as all remedies had proved to be illusory on account of the authorities’ failure to open an investigation into the killing of seven Iranian citizens and/or to provide evidence of the steps taken within that investigation.
60. Furthermore, the applicants wholly rejected the Government’s assertion that the Şemdinli Chief Public Prosecutor’s decision of 7 November 2000 not to prosecute had been delivered to them. They maintained that they had been made aware of that decision after receiving the Government’s observations from the Court on 27 September 2005. The Turkish authorities had also not made any attempt to serve the decision not to prosecute on the first applicant, Mansur Pad, who lived in Stockholm, Sweden. The petitions sent to the Turkish authorities had been written on headed notepaper from the Kurdish Human Rights Project (“KHRP”) with the correspondence address clearly set out and signed by Philip Leach, who had been the applicants’ appointed legal representative at the relevant time. Any response to the petitions should therefore have been sent to him at the specified address in London. No copy had been received.
61. The applicants further challenged the authenticity of the notification which allegedly bore their fingerprints. They pointed out, by way of example, that this document bore the fingerprint of Jaafar Afrasi. However, Mr Afrasi could not have affixed his fingerprint to the document since he had died on 25 February 2000, before the decision not to prosecute was taken on 7 November 2000. Likewise, Mansur Pad could not have received a copy of the decision not to prosecute because at the relevant time he had been living in Stockholm, Sweden. Moreover, no attempt had been made to serve the decision on the applicant Said Pourmola Borazan.

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Tags: 13, 14, 18 and 34 of the Convention, 3, 5, Articles 2, commit unintentional homicide, deprive an individual unlawfully of his or her lib, individual to torture or ill-treatment, intentional homicide