Eye doesn't have much to say about human rights (except they are a good thing).
So we have been scratching our heads to find something ironically human - as is our brief for this column - to impart to readers. But a little story we heard in conversation with Rachel Brett, our Quaker UN representative for human rights and refugees, seems to fit the Eye criteria.
It has a David and Goliath flavour. A Turkish shepherd has taken his government to the European Court of Human Rights because he was forced to do military service at the age of seventy-one. Why was an elderly agricultural worker snatched from the hills and put in a military camp to train with fit twenty year-olds? You may well ask, as did Hamdi Tastan, the shepherd. The answer is, his neighbours ratted on him.
Hamdi told the court that he had been a shepherd since childhood. He worked for his local village in exchange for a roof over his head in winter, clothes and food. When he stopped this arrangement, explaining that his wife had died in childbirth (we assume that he had a much younger wife), the villagers took umbrage. They knew he had never registered for military service and denounced him as a deserter. With neighbours like these, who needs enemies?
Poor Hamdi suffered in camp, speaking only Kurdish and having no teeth. The extreme cold of the camp landed him in hospital suffering heart and lung problems, although his health had been robust out on the hills. Eye feels he must have been coaxed into taking this litigious route but we are glad he did. The court ruled that what happened amounted to degrading treatment under Article 3 (and Article 13) of the European Convention on Human Rights and awarded him 5,000 euros damages with 1,000 euros costs. Now that's what we call a result.

Labels: conscientious objection, human rights, Turkey