On 14 April 2026, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) delivered its judgment unanimously in Pitek v. Türkiye, finding a violation of Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the right to life, in its procedural aspect, in connection with the death of Mehmet Pitek in Nusaybin on 3 April 2016. Mr Pitek was fatally shot while sitting outside his home in the Barış neighbourhood during a security curfew imposed by Turkish authorities in the context of counter-terrorism operations against PKK-affiliated groups in south-eastern Türkiye. He was taken to hospital by ambulance but did not survive. The shooter was never identified. The court found multiple significant failings in the domestic investigation: his wife Kıymet Pitek, the sole eyewitness, was not heard by police until almost four months after the incident; no ballistic examination was carried out on the bullet extracted from the body during autopsy, despite an explicit request from the family’s lawyer; investigators made no effort to determine the origin of the shot or to verify Mrs Pitek’s account that fire may have come from a high-rise building several hundred metres away; and two witnesses named by the widow in a subsequent statement were never interviewed. The court rejected Türkiye’s argument that the curfew and active operations justified these failures, noting that a forensic team had in fact attended the scene on the day of the incident and that the quarter in question was not itself a zone of active operations. It awarded the applicants jointly €10,000 in non-pecuniary damages and €1,000 in costs. Notably, the court declared inadmissible the substantive limb of the Article 2 complaint, namely the allegation that the state had failed to protect Mr Pitek’s life, finding that domestic administrative proceedings on that question were still pending before the Council of State and the complaint was therefore premature.

https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/fre?i=001-249532