Unjust, Restrictive, and Inconsistent

In this 40-page briefing paper, Human Rights Watch analyzes how the Turkish government is failing to provide fair compensation for hundreds of thousands of mainly Kurdish villagers displaced by the military’s brutal counterinsurgency campaigns in the southeast. Although a compensation law aimed at providing fair and appropriate redress to the displaced was adopted by the Turkish parliament in 2004, provincial assessment commissions have arbitrarily and unjustly reduced compensation amounts or denied compensation altogether to those displaced during counterinsurgency operations in the 1980s and 1990s. Human Rights Watch urges the Turkish government to suspend the commissions until their operating methods can be revised.