Information Note on the Court’s case-law 181
January 2015
Mesut Yurtsever and Others v. Turkey - 14946/08, 21030/08, 24309/08 et al.
Judgment 20.1.2015 [Section II]
Article 10
Article 10-1
Freedom to receive information
Ban on Kurdish language newspaper in Turkish prisons: violation
Facts – By decisions of the education committee, the applicants, who were detained in prison, did not receive editions of a daily newspaper in Kurdish. The committee had argued that it was not in a position to verify whether the content of the publications was obscene or likely to endanger security in the prison. None of the appeals by the applicants against those decisions was successful.
Law – Article 10: The refusal by the prison administrative authorities to provide the applicants with certain editions of a daily newspaper in Kurdish amounted to an interference with the applicants’ right to receive information and ideas.
Domestic law recognised the right of convicted prisoners to receive publications where these were not banned, that is, did not contain information, articles, photographs or commentaries that were obscene or likely to endanger security in the establishment.
The national authorities had referred to the relevant legal provision in justifying their decisions but had refused to provide the applicants with certain editions of a daily newspaper not because the content was allegedly obscene or likely to endanger security but because the authorities were unable to assess the content of the publications in question. Accordingly, as they could not understand the language in which the daily in question had been published, the national authorities stated that they were unable to assess whether the content was in conformity with the relevant statutory provision. In the absence of such an assessment, which was moreover a statutory pre-condition, a question arose as to the legal basis for the interference.
In that connection no statutory provision mentioned any possibility at all of restricting or banning a prisoner’s access to publications on account of the language in which these appeared. Furthermore, the monitoring power conferred on the prison authorities under domestic law regarding prisoners’ access to publications concerned only their content. In the present case the authorities had made their decision without carrying out a prior assessment of the content of the publications in question, thus depriving prisoners at their discretion of access to a category of publications from which they could seek to benefit. The decisions of the prison authorities not to provide the applicants with certain editions of the daily newspaper had not been based on any grounds provided for by law. Accordingly, the interference complained of had not been “prescribed by law”.
Conclusion: violation (unanimously).
Article 41: EUR 300 each in respect of non-pecuniary damage.
(See also, for a similar approach regarding the monitoring of prisoners’ written correspondence in a language other than Turkish, Mehmet Nuri Özen and Others v. Turkey, 15672/08 et al., 11 January 2011, Information Note 137)
© Council of Europe/European Court of Human Rights
This summary by the Registry does not bind the Court.
Click here for the Case-Law Information Notes
Full & Egal Universal Law Academy