National Minorities in Turkey: From Lausanne to the European Union

• 01.21.2015, 12:14
•  Region,  World,  Info

Located in the crossroad between Europe and Asia, the territory of today's Turkey for centuries has been under the rule of many empires. Thus during the course of the history Turkey has felt different ethnic, linguistic, cultural and religious influences. As a result Turkey is now inhabited by many national, ethnic, linguistic and religious minorities, but recognizes only three groups of minorities by naming them as "non-Muslims".

Thus the national minorities in Turkey are considered to be Armenian, Greek and Jewish Communities, whose status and the rights have been defined by the treaty of Lausanne, signed on July 24, 1923. 

The second part of the Treaty of Lausanne is about the protection of the minority right in Turkey. According to the Articles from 38 to 44 "the Turkish Government undertakes to assure full protection of life and liberty to all inhabitants of Turkey, irrespective of their nationality, language, race and religion".

According to Article 39, alongside with the official language, which is Turkish, languages of national minorities are also allowed to be used. "No restrictions shall be imposed on the free use by any Turkish national of any language".

According to Article 40 non-Muslim minorities have equal rights to establish and manage charitable, religious, social institutions, schools, other institutions for instruction and education at their own expanse, with the right to use their own language and the exercise their own religion in these institutions.

According to Article 42 the Turkish Government will undertake the full protection of churches, synagogues, cemeteries and other religious institutions of the minorities.

The aforementioned Articles of the Treaty of Lausanne on legal guarantees of the minority rights refers only to the non-Muslim minorities (the treaty of Lausanne did not recognize non-Turk Muslims, including the Kurds and the Alevis, as minorities). 

After signing the Treaty of Lausanne, the Turkish authorities drastically changed their policies towards national minorities. The policies towards the Kurds changed, too. Moreover, the Turks very soon declared that there are no national minorities in Turkey and all of them are Turks. This was fixed in the 1924 Constitution, the 88^th Article of which said: "The inhabitants of Turkey, irrespective of their religion and race, according to their citizenship are considered to be Turk". In other words, anyone who is a Turkish citizen is considered to be a Turk.

It is worth mentioning that this point is also included in the current Constitution of Turkey. The Article 88 of 1924 Constitution has become Article 66 of 1982 Constitution. Consequently, there is no reference to the national minorities in the Turkish Constitution. The Turkish statistics tried to present the countries population as much homogeneous as possible by reducing the number of national minorities. Turkey does not organize official census based on national affiliation.

With the adoption of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the process of adoption of numerous international documents began. Turkey has joined many international agreements on human rights protection, but many of them have been ratified with special reservations, because of minority rights issues (for example, Turkey signed the 1965 Convention on "The Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination" in 1972 and ratified in 2002, but still it has not recognized the eligibility of the Committee for Combating Discrimination to receive individual applications).

At the same time Turkey has not signed numerous important international documents (1960 UNESCO Convention "Against Discrimination in Education", 1955 Framework Convention for the "Protection of National Minorities" of the Council of Europe, 1992 "The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages" of the Council of Europe, etc). However, not being signatory  to the aforementioned documents does not exempt Turkey from the obligations to guarantee the protection of the national minority rights, as Turkey is a full member of the European Parliament.

Turkey has also not joined many important UNESCO cultural heritage protection conventions and declarations. In the progress reports of the European Union Turkey is still being criticized for the protection of minority right, Turkish policies towards its national minorities (to become an EU member, according to the Copenhagen Criteria, Turkey is obliged to protect human rights, respect and protect the rights of the minority rights).