THE PROPERTY commission in the north is offering Greek Cypriot applicants a fraction of what their land is worth, reports said yesterday.
Phileleftheros reported that as soon as the Turkish side had handed over the names of Greek Cypriots who applied to the commission to the Council of Europe, the amount of compensation started falling.
Over 200 Greek Cypriots have applied for property compensation from the Turkish Cypriot side, which is attempting to prove to the European Court of Human Rights that the commission constitutes an adequate domestic remedy in the settlement of claims.
If the court accepts the premise, it will jeopardise hundreds of Greek Cypriot applications to Europe for restitution of their properties.
According to Phileleftheros yesterday, once the list was handed over to the Council of Europe, it became apparent that the Turkish side had no intention of giving out proper compensation. Some people were being offered only 10-15 per cent of the market value of their property, the paper said.
The report followed a recent case of a Greek Cypriot who had been waiting since March for his money.
The government has repeatedly warned that the commission is a gimmick and urged Greek Cypriots not to apply. However, many refugees beset by financial problems felt they had no other option.
Human Rights lawyer Achilleas Demetriades also warned recently that Greek Cypriots who resort to the property commission in the north could find themselves in the same position as the 1,500 people who fell victim to a similar creation in southern Turkey.
He cited a Human Rights Watch (HRW) report on a similar ‘property commission’ set up in southern Turkey to compensate 1,500 people displaced by the Turkish army during counterinsurgency operations in the 1980s and 1990s.
HRW said Turkey’s compensation law offered hope that the government would finally compensate hundreds of thousands of displaced people for their losses at the hands of the military. Instead they had been victimised again “by the arbitrariness of a compensation process that was supposedly established to help them”.
In January 2006, the ECHR had rejected the application of a Turkish villager on the grounds that the Compensation Law was an effective domestic remedy. Afterwards more than 1,500 cases pending before the court were dismissed on the grounds that the applicants had not exhausted the effective domestic remedy provided by the Compensation Law.
HRW said that since the European Court for Human Rights had announced its decision in the case, there had been a noticeable deterioration in the implementation of the Compensation Law.
Increasingly, damage assessment commissions appeared to apply arbitrary and unjust criteria in calculating compensation, resulting in absurdly low compensation amounts in many cases. These calculations consistently seemed to favour the government and appear to be biased against the victims of government abuse, HRW said.
