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Abstract

Taking up from where Chapter 5 left off, this chapter shows the ECtHR’s response to Kurdish legal mobilisation against state violence in the emergency region. On the basis of a process-oriented analysis, it traces the evolution of the ECtHR’s jurisprudence on gross and systematic human rights violations in the Kurdish region and Turkey’s execution thereof. It shows how the ECtHR’s engagement in the Kurdish conflict has evolved with its acquisition of expertise on Turkey’s legal system and yet varied in response to emerging political and legal developments in Turkey and Europe. The chapter provides a detailed doctrinal analysis of each of the three phases in the ECtHR's oversight of gross violations in the Kurdish region, demonstrating that the Court's jurisprudence has been inconsistent and incoherent under the façade of judicial meticulousness and unduly deferential to the Turkish government's counterterrorism argument. It concludes that the ECtHR, even during the peak of its engagement in the Kurdish cases, refrained from making full use of its jurisprudential powers to hold Turkey accountable.