On 9 June 2009, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) rendered its judgment in the case of Opuz v. Turkey (application no. 33401/02) concerning the Turkish authorities’ failure to protect the applicant and her mother from domestic violence. Interights, the international centre for the legal protection of human rights, was a third party intervener on the case, submitting the following brief.
The Court held unanimously that there had been a violation of Article 2 (right to life), Article 3 (prohibition of torture and of inhuman and degrading treatment) and Article 14 (prohibition of discrimination) read in conjunction with the former two of the European Convention on Human Rights in respect of the applicant’s mother who was killed by the applicant’s ex-husband despite the fact that the domestic authorities had been repeatedly alerted about his violent and abusive behavior.
The following note provides a survey of both the facts of the case and the substantive rationale of the Court in its decision to uphold the violation of the abovementioned rights, and most eminently the government’s facilitation, or otherwise put, the procedural violation of the right to life that arguably becomes the counterpart for the ECHR judgment in the Osman case, considered below, where the Court rejected the violation of the right to life on similar grounds.