Mother-activism before the European Court of Human Rights: Gender sensitivity towards Kurdish mothers and wives in enforced disappearance cases
Mother-activism before the European Court of Human Rights: Gender sensitivity towards Kurdish mothers and wives in enforced disappearance cases

Summary/Abstract: The Kurdish population in South-Eastern Turkey has been heavily subject to a widespread policy of state-sponsored and state-performed violence, with the predominant strategy being that of enforced disappearances. Those targeted by state agents as enemies and subsequently forcibly disappeared tend to be predominantly male, while their wives and mothers are left behind, often tortured, harassed and threatened, however rarely kidnapped. This international crime distorts traditional family roles and relations and leaves women in a particularly vulnerable position due to the gender-biased realities which isolate men as victims of this particular crime. Remarkably, the struggle to find the remains of the disappeared often becomes the sole priority of these women who therein enter public arenas in search for their loved ones. What this paper wishes to examine is this kind of (assisted) agency of Kurdish wives and mothers of the disappeared, its presentation, interpretation, acceptance by the European Court of Human Rights, and the lessons it transmits about women’s experiences of conflict.

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