Tahir Elçi

Tahir Elçi (1966, Cizre – 28 November 2015) was a Kurdish lawyer and the chairman of Diyarbakır Bar Association.

Tahir Elçi
Personal details
Born1966
Cizre, Şırnak Province, Turkey
Died28 November 2015(2015-11-28) (aged 48–49)
Diyarbakır, Turkey
Spouse(s)Türkan Elçi
Children2
EducationLaw
Alma materDicle University
OccupationLawyer, activist

Education and professional career

He went to primary and secondary school in Cizre and graduated from Dicle University in 1991.[1] In 1993 he was a lawyer in Cizre, and a member of the Cizre Bar Association and defending people against the Turkish state at the European Commission of Human Rights (ECHR).[2] In November 1993 he was detained and on the 10 December 1993 he was remanded to prison accused of links with the Kurdistan Workers' Party's armed wing.[2] He was released from custody on 17 February 1994 together with other defendants.[2] Between 1996 and 2006 he was active at the Diyarbakir Bar association as a manager and in 2012 he was elected its chairman.[1]

On 23 March 2014, he was the lawyer in the Kuşkonar massacre case in the ECHR, in which Turkey was condemned for massacring Kurdish civilians and blaming the PKK.[2] Elçi was detained several times and received death threats after saying the banned PKK should not be regarded as a terrorist organization.[3] In October 2015, Elçi was detained by Turkish authorities and accused of disseminating "terrorist propaganda" after having said in an interview with CNN Türk, that the PKK was not a terrorist organization.[4][5]

Death

He was killed in the Sur district of Diyarbakir in southeastern Turkey on 28 November 2015.[4][6] He was shot during a shootout between police and members of the Patriotic Revolutionary Youth Movement (YDG-H), the PKK's youth wing, following a press statement during which he had been calling for an end to violence between the PKK and the Turkish state.[7]

Two members of the YDG-H shot and killed two police officers and fled down the Yenikapı street, where Tahir Elçi was holding the press conference beside the "Four-legged Minaret" of the Sheikh Matar Mosque. As the YDG-H militants ran down the street and past the scene of the press conference, police officers opened fire on them. Elçi was shot in the back of the head during the shootout and the YDG-H militants escaped.[7]

The same day, the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL) and the European Association of Lawyers for Democracy and Human Rights (ELDA) condemned the assassination and called for an independent investigation.[8] The Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) called the shooting a "planned assassination," and protests erupted in Turkey after Elçi's killing.[4] Elçi's brother Ahmet Elçi was quoted as saying that his brother was "murdered by the state."[9]

Anti-government protests in Turkey with crowds shouting "You can't kill us all" followed the attack.[4][3]

The HDP leader Selahattin Demirtaş claimed in his interview on IMC TV that according to their investigators, the bullet which killed Tahir Elçi was fired by a Turkish police officer.[10]

Investigation

Following the murder, Turkish authorities announced the "we aren't ruling out the possibility that a third party directly targeted him."[3] In June 2016, Turkish authorities claimed that a captured militant witnessed PKK militants Uğur Yakışır and Mahsum Gürkhan open fire upon Tahir Elçi the moment he was killed.[11][12][13] But in 2019, Forensic Architecture conducted an independent investigation on behalf of the Diyarbakır Bar Association and analyzed the killing. They concluded that the likely fatal shot probably came from police officers involved in the shootout and not from the escaping PKK militants. The investigation did not conclude whether the shot that killed Elçi was deliberate.[7][14] The full video of the investigation was released 7 February 2019.

See also

References
  1. "A lifetime of struggle: Tahir Elçi". ANF News. Retrieved 31 January 2020.
  2. "HUDOC - European Court of Human Rights". hudoc.echr.coe.int. Retrieved 7 January 2020.
  3. "Pro-Kurdish lawyer Tahir Elci shot dead in Turkey". BBC. 28 November 2015. Retrieved 28 November 2015.
  4. Bozarsian, Mahmut (28 November 2015). "Protests as top Kurdish lawyer gunned down in Turkey". Yahoo! News. Agence France-Presse. Retrieved 28 November 2015.
  5. "Militant claims PKK behind murder of Tahir Elçi - Turkey News". Hürriyet Daily News. Retrieved 31 January 2020.
  6. "Tahir Elçi killed in clashes". Milliyet (in Turkish). 28 November 2015. Retrieved 28 November 2015.
  7. Investigation of the audio-visual material included in the case file of the killing of Tahir Elçi Forensic Architecture
  8. "Press release on the murder of Tahir Elçi, president of the Diyarbakir Bar Association" (PDF). European Criminal Bar Association. Retrieved 22 March 2020.
  9. "Tahir Elçi'nin abisi: Net olan tek şey var; kardeşimi devlet katletti" (in Turkish). ANF. 28 November 2015. Retrieved 28 November 2015.
  10. ""Tahir Elçi'yi öldüren kurşunun polisin silahından çıktığı kesin" -". imc-tv.net. Retrieved 26 November 2016.
  11. "Militant claims PKK behind murder of Tahir Elçi - Turkey News". Hürriyet Daily News. Retrieved 16 December 2020.
  12. "Turkey: Foreign snipers among PKK militants - Turkey News". Hürriyet Daily News. Retrieved 16 December 2020.
  13. "Foreign snipers shoot ambulances in Cizre, Davutoğlu says". Milliyet (in Turkish). Retrieved 16 December 2020.
  14. Architecture, Forensic (7 February 2019), The Killing of Tahir Elçi - EN, retrieved 8 February 2019
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