Information Note on the Court’s case-law No. 127

February 2010

Kemal Taşkın and Others v. Turkey - 30206/04

Judgment 2.2.2010 [Section II]

Article 8

Article 8-1

Respect for private life

Requirement for first names in official documents to be spelt only with letters from official Turkish alphabet: no violation

Facts – The applicants, who are of Kurdish origin, brought proceedings before a district court seeking to have their forenames changed. Their requests were refused on the grounds that the names they had chosen contained characters other than the twenty-nine letters of the official alphabet set out in the Law on the Adoption and Application of the Turkish alphabet. The Court of Cassation upheld the first-instance judgments.

Law – Article 8: The refusal to allow the applicants to spell the names they had requested using letters not contained in the Turkish alphabet had amounted to interference with the exercise of their right to respect for their private life. The interference had been based on the Law requiring the Turkish alphabet to be used in all official documents. Provided they respected the rights protected by the Convention, the Contracting States were free to require their official language or languages to be used in identity papers and other official documents and to lay down rules for that purpose. Consequently, the interference had been aimed at preventing disorder and protecting the rights of others. As to the allegation made by two of the applicants that the refusal in question had been damaging to their ethnic identity, the Court noted at the outset that the persons concerned were allowed to use Kurdish forenames and surnames. Furthermore, it did not appear from the explanations provided that, when the forenames in question were spelt using the letters of the Turkish alphabet, they had a vulgar or ridiculous meaning which might have caused the applicants inconvenience socially or made it in any way difficult to identify them personally. Under the Turkish system, it was also possible to have names containing sounds which had no precise equivalent in the Turkish alphabet transcribed phonetically in the civil register. In that regard, Convention No. 14 of the International Commission on Civil Status (ICCS)*