Kasa v. Turkey (45902/99)
| Date | 20080520 |
|---|---|
| Article | 2 |
| Decision | no viol. |
No violation of Article 2 (life)
Violation of Article 2 (investigation)
Kasa v. Turkey (no. 45902/99)
The applicant, Hamdi Kasa, is a Turkish national who was born in 1950 and lives in Istanbul.
The case concerned the applicant’s complaint that his 18-year-old son, Hakan Kasa, was killed by the police on 13 August 1993 following an armed clash in a shopping centre. Police had gone to the centre following an anonymous tip-off about a number of armed people behaving suspiciously there. Four others were also killed during the incident. The applicant relied, in particular, on Article 2 (right to life).
The Court noted, in particular, that witnesses had submitted that the first gunshot had come from one of the five killed during the incident and that police officers had issued warnings and had only started shooting once fired at. Furthermore, 35 of the bullets found at the scene had come from the suspects’ firearms. The Court also recalled that it had already held in other cases that it could not substitute its own assessment of such a situation for that of the police officers who had had to react in the heat of the moment. That would impose an unrealistic burden on a State and its law-enforcement personnel in the execution of their duty, perhaps to the detriment of their lives and others’. The Court therefore considered that the use of lethal force in the circumstances, however regrettable, had not exceeded what had been “absolutely necessary” for the purposes of self-defence and carrying out a lawful arrest. Accordingly, the Court held unanimously that there had been no violation of Article 2 in respect of the killing of the applicant’s son.
On the other hand, the Court observed that the investigating authorities had only started questioning those police officers involved in the killing of the applicant’s son four months after the incident. Some of the officers had not, in fact, been questioned until more than a year later. The Turkish Government gave no explanation for those delays. As those officers had been the only eye-witnesses to the incident, their questioning should have been a priority. The Court concluded that that failing was so serious that it had made the whole of the investigation ineffective and held unanimously that there had been a violation of Article 2.
As the applicant failed to submit his claim for just satisfaction, the Court considered that there was no call to award Mr Kasa any such award. (The judgment is available only in English.)