Information Note on the Court’s case-law No. 137
January 2011
Mehmet Nuri Özen and Others v. Turkey - 15672/08
Judgment 11.1.2011 [Section II]
Article 8
Article 8-1
Respect for correspondence
Refusal of prison authorities to send prisoners’ letters to members of their family drafted in the Kurdish language: violation
Facts – The applicants, who were serving prison sentences in high-security prisons, were denied permission by the authorities to send letters they had written to their families on the grounds that, being in Kurdish, the letters could not be checked to ascertain whether or not they contravened the rules. Appeals by the applicants against those decisions were dismissed by the judge responsible for the execution of sentences, who found that there was no procedural defect or error of law, taking the view, among others, that no statutory provision required the prison authorities to bear the cost of translating letters. He explained that the reason for the refusal to send the letters was not that they were written in Kurdish but that their content was incomprehensible and thus impossible to scrutinise, having regard in particular to the imperatives of order and security.
Law – Article 8: The refusal to send the applicants’ letters had constituted interference with their freedom of correspondence, since their private communication had been prevented. As to whether that interference had been in accordance with the law, the Court noted that under domestic law the prison authorities’ power to scrutiny and censor correspondence related only to the content of that correspondence, whereas their decision in the applicants’ case had been based on separate criteria. There was no statutory provision concerning the use of a language other than Turkish in prisoners’ letters or indicating any restrictions or prohibitions that might be imposed in that connection. The Court thus concluded that the interference with the applicants’ freedom of correspondence had not been “in accordance with the law”. Moreover, the Court noted that at the material time, in the absence of any legal framework clarifying the procedure for handling correspondence written in a language other than Turkish, the prison authorities had developed a practice of requiring a prior translation at the prisoner’s own expense. That practice, as implemented, was incompatible with Article 8 because it automatically excluded from that provision’s scope of protection an entire category of correspondence in which prisoners might wish to engage.
Conclusion: violation (unanimously).
Article 41: Finding of a violation constituted sufficient just satisfaction in respect of any non-pecuniary damage.
© Council of Europe/European Court of Human Rights
This summary by the Registry does not bind the Court.
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