Limits of Supranational Justice

Tue, 18 May 2021 18:00 - 19:30 British Summer Time (UTC+1)

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Limits of Supranational Justice – The European Court of Human Rights and Turkey’s Kurdish Conflict

About this event

This online meeting will discuss Dr Dilek Kurban’s book Limits of Supranational Justice: The European Court of Human Rights and Turkey’s Kurdish Conflict (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Dr Kurban offers a contextualised analysis of the European Court of Human Rights’ (ECtHR) engagement in Turkey’s Kurdish conflict since the early 1990s, and her book makes a much-needed contribution to scholarships on supranational courts and legal mobilisation. Based on a socio-legal account of the efforts of Kurdish lawyers in mobilising the ECtHR on behalf of abducted, executed, tortured and displaced civilians under emergency rule, and doctrinal legal analysis of the ECtHR’s jurisprudence in these cases, this book powerfully demonstrates the Strasbourg court’s failure to end gross violations in the Kurdish region. It brings together legal, political, sociological and historical narratives, and highlights the factors enabling the perpetuation of state violence and political repression against the Kurds. The effectiveness of supranational courts can best be assessed in hard cases such as Turkey, and this book demonstrates the need for a reappraisal of current academic and jurisprudential approaches to authoritarian regimes.

Speakers – Dr Dilek Kurban and Prof. Helen Duffy.

Moderator of the events – Dr Derya Bayir

When: Tuesday, 18 May 2021

18:00 BST

The event is open to all and to join you must register via the link below

https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUvd-yhqDkoE9arGOAaOu1pNX5Jex2p6xYV

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

*The event is 1.5 hours long. The last 30 minutes will be a Q&A session.

Dilek Kurban

is a Fellow and Lecturer at the Hertie School in Berlin. She obtained her PhD from Maastricht University Faculty of Law in 2018. Her dissertation received the Erasmus Dissertation Prize 2019 in the Netherlands. She also holds a Juris Doctor (JD) from Columbia Law School and a Master in International Affairs (MIA) from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. Her research interests include supranational human rights courts, state violence, legal mobilisation and judicial politics, with a particular focus on authoritarian regimes and a regional focus on Turkey. She is the author of Limits of Supranational Justice: The European Court of Human Rights and Turkey’s Kurdish Conflict (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Kurban’s research is also published in edited volumes and in peer-reviewed journals, including Human Rights Law Review and Columbia Human Rights Law Review. Her research received funding from Columbia University, the European Commission (the Marie Curie and FP programs) and Mercator Stiftung. During 2012-2019, as the Turkey expert of the Network of Independent Experts in the Non-Discrimination Field, she reported to the European Commission. Before transitioning to academia, during 2005-2013, she engaged in policy-oriented research at the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation (TESEV), most recently as the Director of its Democratisation programme. During the same period, she wrote regular columns in Turkey’s leading newspapers and frequently appeared on international media to discuss her research and to comment on human rights and democratisation in Turkey. Earlier in her career, Kurban worked as an Associate Political Affairs Officer at the United Nations Department of Political Affairs in New York.

Prof. Helen Duffy

has been a staff member of the Grotius Centre since January 2015 when she was appointed as Gieskes Professor of International Human Rights and Humanitarian Law. Professor Duffy currently teaches Masters courses: ‘International Protection of Human Rights’ and ‘Humanitarian law, Human Rights and Terrorism’. In addition, she also runs ‘Human Rights in Practice,’ an international practice based in the Hague that specializes in strategic litigation before regional and international human rights courts and bodies (www.rightsinpractice.org). She held a variety of international legal positions prior to establishing her practice in 2011 including: Legal Director of INTERIGHTS, Legal Officer in the Prosecutor’s office of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), Counsel to Human Rights Watch/New York, Legal Director of the Centre for Human Rights Legal Action (Guatemala), Legal Adviser to the UK ‘Arms for Iraq’ Inquiry and Legal Officer in the UK government legal service. Prof. Duffy is Honorary Professor at the University of Glasgow and visiting professor at the University of Melbourne and American University. She serves on the advisory boards of several organisations. Her publications on international law and practice include The ‘War on Terror’ and the Framework of International law’ (CUP, 2015) and Strategic Human Rights Litigation: Understanding and Maximising Impact (Hart Publishing, 2018). Her current areas of research include human rights litigation, the interplay of human rights and humanitarian law and several issues related to counter-terrorism, human rights and the rule of law.

Dr Derya Bayir

is the author of the book Minorities and Nationalism in Turkish Law. She obtained her doctorate from the Law Department at Queen Mary. Her thesis was awarded a prize by the Contemporary Turkish Studies Chair at the LSE. Derya has litigated many cases before the European Court of Human Rights, including the prominent case of Güveç v. Turkey. She was affiliated to GLOCUL as a visiting scholar while holding a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to research secular law and religious diversity in Turkey. Her areas of research include human rights, minority rights, diversity and law, and ethno-religious diversity in Turkey’s legal system, Nationalism, Ottoman pluralism, Constitutional Law, autonomous and federal state systems.