SECOND SECTION
DECISION
Application no. 21470/13
Erdal KARAKOÇ
against Türkiye
The European Court of Human Rights (Second Section), sitting on 24 March 2026 as a Committee composed of:
Péter Paczolay, President,
Gediminas Sagatys,
Stéphane Pisani, judges,
and Dorothee von Arnim, Deputy Section Registrar,
Having regard to:
the application (no. 21470/13) against the Republic of Türkiye lodged with the Court under Article 34 of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (“the Convention”) on 19 March 2013 by a Turkish national, Mr Erdal Karakoç (“the applicant”), who was born in 1967, lives in Tunceli and was represented by Ms C. Vine and Mr J. Bunting, lawyers practising in London;
Having deliberated, decides as follows:
SUBJECT MATTER OF THE CASE
1. The case concerns the alleged failure by the authorities to provide credible information as to the fate of the applicant’s relatives, who had disappeared in 1938. The applicant complained of a violation of his rights under Articles 2, 3, 6, 13 and 14 of the Convention.
Background to the case2. The applicant claims that his half-sister (on the father’s side), Sakine, then aged four, and his cousin, Şemsi, then aged six, disappeared in 1938 during military operations carried out in Tunceli (a city in eastern Türkiye – also known as Dersim).
3. The applicant alleges that in 1939 his father learned that the children had been taken to a military base in the Ovacık Region during the military operations in question, had subsequently been sent out of the region, and had been placed for adoption with the family of a military officer.
4. The applicant further claims that in 1939 his father wrote to Marshal F.Ç., the then Chief of the General Staff, seeking information as to the children’s whereabouts. He alleges that his father was later informed that the girls had been placed in the care of Lieutenant Colonel M.Y., a military officer residing in Istanbul. The applicant submits a copy of an official travel permit to Istanbul, which was issued upon that lead, in 1941, by the district governor’s office of Salihli. According to the applicant’s account, his father visited M.Y.’s home in the presence of a police officer and during this visit, M.Y.’s wife showed two children, whom the father did not immediately recognise as being his missing relatives. When the applicant’s father returned later with other family members, he discovered that M.Y.’s family had left the address and that the children were no longer there. The subsequent whereabouts of the two girls were never clarified.
The applicant’s requests to the authorities for an investigation5. Following his father’s death in 1995, the applicant resumed the search for his missing relatives; in 2010 he submitted information requests to various institutions, including the Ministry of National Defence, the General Staff of the armed forces, the Coast Guard Command, the Directorate of State Archives and the Ministry of the Interior.
6. Eventually, on 21 December 2011 the applicant lodged a criminal complaint with the Hozat chief public prosecutor’s office, requesting an investigation, both into the fate of his half-sister, Sakine and cousin, Şemsi, be opened and those responsible be identified.
7. The prosecutor took a statement from the applicant on the same day. In the course of the subsequent proceedings, the prosecutor also requested civil and population registry records of the applicant’s family in order to find any trace of the missing girls, asked the Salihli district governor’s office for copies of the relevant documents, including the travel permit issued to the applicant’s father in 1941, and wrote to the General Staff of the armed forces requesting M.Y.’s service records.
8. In response, the Salihli police department reported that no archived documents could be found relating to the said 1941 travel permit. However, a note from the General Staff of the armed forces confirmed that M.Y. had served in the military until his retirement in 1941 and that he had two sons, O.B.Y. and T.Y., born in 1928 and 1934 respectively. Further correspondence with the civil registry office revealed that T.Y. had died in 1991, while O.B.Y. was still alive and residing in the United States.
9. On 11 July 2012 the prosecutor issued a decision of non-prosecution on the grounds that there was no material evidence of the offence of deprivation of liberty. The decision noted, inter alia, that there was no record of a person named “Sakine” in the civil registry records of the applicant or his father; that no archive record could be obtained in respect of the alleged letter of 1941 from the Salihli district governor’s office authorising the applicant’s father to visit M.Y.’s residence in Istanbul; that M.Y. had died in 1943; and that, according to their civil registry records, neither he nor his sons had any daughters.
10. The applicant’s objection to the decision not to prosecute was rejected by the Erzincan Assize Court on 17 August 2012, and he was served with the final decision on 21 September 2012. The applicant subsequently lodged the present application on 19 March 2013.
Subsequent developments following the lodging of the application11. Following the lodging of the present application, the applicant informed the Court, on 14 November 2017, that he had succeeded in establishing contact with O.B.Y., the now‑elderly son of M.Y., who had been identified in the course of the 2011-2012 investigation. In their correspondence between December 2013 and February 2014, O.B.Y. remembered that, when he had been about nine or ten years old, two little girls who did not speak Turkish had been brought to his family’s home and that he had known them by different names. He further recounted that around five years after his father’s death, the older girl had contracted meningitis and died, and that, with regard to the younger girl, he knew only that his mother had broken off contact with her in the 1950s. Given the many decades that had passed, O.B.Y. was unable to provide any additional details or documentation about the girls’ identities or their ultimate fate.
12. The applicant further submitted that, on 25 May 2015, he had requested another investigation on the basis of his correspondence with O.B.Y. However, on 23 June 2015 the Istanbul public prosecutor’s office refused that request, noting that the matter had already been investigated and closed by the Hozat public prosecutor’s decision of 2012. The applicant’s objection to that decision was likewise rejected by the Istanbul Third Magistrates’ Court on 31 December 2015.
13. The applicant subsequently lodged an individual application with the Constitutional Court concerning the Istanbul Third Magistrates’ Court’s decision. On 13 January 2017 the Constitutional Court examined the applicant’s individual application under the procedural limb of Article 3 of the Convention and declared it manifestly ill‑founded on account of the lapse of time since the events of 1938.
THE COURT’S ASSESSMENT Complaints under Articles 2, 3, 6 and 13 of the Convention14. The applicant complained under Articles 2, 3, 6 and 13 of the Convention that the authorities had failed to conduct an effective investigation in order to ascertain the fate of his half-sister and cousin, who had disappeared and who, he alleged, had been abducted and forcibly given up for adoption to M.Y.
15. The Court notes that the applicant’s complaints under Articles 2, 3, 6 and 13 of the Convention essentially concern the alleged failure by the State authorities to conduct an effective investigation and to provide him with definitive and/or credible information as to the fate of his missing half-sister and cousin. The Court observes that the applicant could not develop personal ties with Sakine and Şemsi, as they had allegedly been separated from their families before the applicant’s birth. It considers that it may leave open the question whether the applicant’s complaint falls to be examined under Article 3 of the Convention (compare in this regard Janowiec and Others v. Russia [GC], nos. 55508/07 and 29520/09, § 178, ECHR 2013) or under the ”private life”-aspect of Article 8 of the Convention (see Znamenskaya v. Russia, no. 77785/01, § 27, 2 June 2005, and the cases cited therein) in view of the following.
16. The Court observes at the outset that the disappearance of the applicant’s relatives allegedly occurred in 1938, that is, long before Türkiye ratified the Convention in 1954 and accepted the right of individual application, and long before the Convention itself was adopted on 4 November 1950 and came into force on 3 September 1953.
17. The Court established the general principles concerning its temporal jurisdiction in cases where the interference predates the adoption or the ratification of the Convention in Blečić v. Croatia ([GC], no. 59532/00, §§ 70 and 79-81, ECHR 2006-III) and Šilih v. Slovenia ([GC], no. 71463/01, §§ 162-63, ECHR 2009), and later refined them in Janowiec and Others (cited above, §§ 141-151).
18. The Court reiterates that, in accordance with the generally recognised principle of non-retroactivity of treaties, a State is bound by the Convention only in respect of acts or facts which took place after its entry into force in respect of that State (see Blečić, cited above, §§ 70 and 79). In determining its temporal jurisdiction, the Court must identify the time of the alleged interference, having regard to the scope of the Convention right at stake and to the facts constitutive of the alleged breach (Blečić, cited above, § 82).
Where the event giving rise to an alleged procedural obligation occurred before the critical date of entry into force of the Convention for the respondent State, the Court’s temporal jurisdiction may extend only to procedural acts or omissions occurring after that date (see Šilih, cited above, § 159). However, as clarified by the Grand Chamber in Janowiec (cited above, § 145), the existence of a “genuine connection” between the triggering event and the entry into force of the Convention in respect of the respondent State is a condition sine qua non for the procedural obligation to come into effect.
19. As regards that “genuine connection” test, the Court has emphasised that the time factor is the first and most crucial indicator of the genuine nature of the connection. The lapse of time between the triggering event and the critical date must remain reasonably short and, although there are no strict legal criteria defining an absolute limit, it should not exceed ten years (see Janowiec and Others, cited above, §§ 146 and 148, and compare Mocanu and Others v. Romania [GC], nos. 10865/09 and 2 others, §§ 205-11, ECHR 2014).
20. Even where that temporal proximity requirement is not satisfied, a connection which is not “genuine” may exceptionally be sufficient to establish the Court’s jurisdiction if it is needed to ensure that the guarantees and underlying values of the Convention are protected in a real and effective manner (see, for the relevant principles, Šilih, cited above, § 163, and Janowiec and Others, cited above, §§ 149-51). However, the Court made it clear that this “Convention values” clause cannot be applied to events which occurred prior to the adoption of the Convention on 4 November 1950. A Contracting Party therefore cannot be held responsible under the Convention for not investigating even the most serious crimes under international law if they predate the Convention itself (see Janowiec and Others, cited above, § 151).
21. Turning to the present case, the Court notes that the disappearance relied upon by the applicant occurred in 1938. This date precedes by more than ten years the adoption of the Convention and its entry into force in respect of the respondent State. In such circumstances, the lapse of time between the triggering event and the critical date does not comply with the “genuine connection” requirement as formulated in the Court’s case-law (see Janowiec and Others, cited above, §§ 145-46, and compare Mocanu and Others, cited above, §§ 207-08). Furthermore, since the events in question occurred prior to 4 November 1950, the “Convention values” exception cannot be relied upon so as to establish the Court’s temporal jurisdiction (Janowiec and Others, cited above, § 151).
22. The Court observes that the applicant relied on investigative steps undertaken by the domestic authorities between 2011 and 2012, as well as subsequent prosecutorial and judicial decisions, including the Constitutional Court’s ruling (see paragraphs 6-10 and 12-13 above). The Court reiterates in this connection that subsequent proceedings pursued by an applicant after the critical date must be seen as the use of available domestic remedies and that the decisions given in those proceedings merely highlight that the existing legal situation had arisen in 1938. They cannot, by themselves, create a temporal link where the alleged interference predated the critical date (see Blečić, cited above, §§ 79-81, and Polaczkiewicz and Others v. Poland (dec.), nos. 15404/15 and 5 others, §§ 36-41, 18 June 2019, compare also Zorica Jovanović v. Serbia, no. 21794/08, § 48, ECHR 2013, and Petrović and Others v. Croatia, nos. 32514/22 and 2 others, § 123, 14 January 2025).
23. The Court reiterates that the Convention does not impose a specific obligation on Contracting States to provide redress for wrongs or damage caused prior to the critical date; that is 1938 in the instant case. To take the date of later remedial recourses, namely the proceedings initiated before the Hozat public prosecutor’s office and subsequent developments, as the relevant point in time for the purposes of temporal jurisdiction would undermine the general rule of non-retroactivity of treaties (see Blečić, cited above, §§ 79-80, and Polaczkiewicz and Others, cited above, § 40). The respondent State cannot be held responsible under the Convention for not investigating the disappearances at issue as they predate the adoption of the Convention itself (see also Janowiec and Others, cited above, § 151).
24. Having regard to the above considerations, the Court concludes that the applicant’s complaints, in so far as they concern an alleged failure of domestic authorities to account for the fate of his relatives, are incompatible ratione temporis with the provisions of the Convention within the meaning of Article 35 § 3 (a) and must be rejected in accordance with Article 35 § 4.
Complaint under Article 14 of the Convention25. The applicant further complained under Article 14 of the Convention that he had been discriminated against on account of his Kurdish ethnic origin, alleging that the domestic authorities had failed to conduct an effective investigation in order to ascertain the fate of his family members.
26. In the light of the conclusion reached regarding the complaints that the applicant raised under Articles 2, 3, 6 and 13 of the Convention (see paragraph 24 above), the Court considers that applicant’s complaint under Article 14 is likewise incompatible ratione temporis with the provisions of the Convention within the meaning of Article 35 § 3 (a) and must be rejected in accordance with Article 35 § 4.
For these reasons, the Court, unanimously,
Declares the application inadmissible.
Done in English and notified in writing on 30 April 2026.
Dorothee von Arnim Péter Paczolay
Deputy Registrar President