THE GOVERNMENT is palpably nervous about a case being considered by the European Court of Human Rights that could see the court approve a planned exchange of property with a Greek Cypriot refugee receiving Turkish Cypriot land in the south in compensation for his land in the occupied areas.
Details of the case are sketchy, but it appears to involve a Greek Cypriot who had a case pending before the ECHR. With cases frozen while the court evaluates the effectiveness of the Turkish Cypriot property commission, established at the request of the ECHR, the refugee reportedly approached the commission with a land swap on top of some form of financial compensation. The ECHR is now apparently considering whether to give its seal of approval to the deal.
It’s understandable that the government should be twitchy about the prospect of such a deal. Quite apart from giving credence to the property commission, which the government insists is an illegal body, it would also throw wide open the way in which the government has managed the property issue through the Interior Ministry’s Guardian of Turkish Cypriot properties. The legal precedent it would set would be a major setback to the way the government has pursued the political problem of Cyprus through the international courts.
The government is insisting that the property issue cannot be reduced to a private exchange conducted away from the eyes of the legitimate Republic of Cyprus. “Such an agreement is not compatible with the protection of human rights,” the Government Spokesman said earlier this week.
The irony is that the government has over the decades built its policy on the fundamental human right of the individual’s free enjoyment of property. It is the government that encouraged dozens of Greek Cypriots to launch private cases against Turkey for denying them that right. Yet today it is in a panic about an individual’s decision freely to dispose of his property in a way that doesn’t suit the government’s interests.
Suddenly, the government’s position sounds very similar to that held for years by the Turkish side, that the property question is a fundamentally political issue of the Cyprus problem, one that cannot be dealt with piecemeal by individual cases, ultimately one that has to await a comprehensive solution of the Cyprus problem.
Could the government have opened a Pandora’s Box by staking so much on the European Court of Human Rights? After all, the law is something that is fluid, open to interpretation, shifting case by case, setting new precedents as it addresses specific problems. What had once seemed a cast iron way of putting pressure on Turkey could come back to haunt the government, suddenly turning the pressure onto the Republic of Cyprus.
