Cyprus, officially the Republic of Cyprus, is an island country in the eastern Mediterranean Sea. Although it is geographically located in West Asia, its cultural identity and geopolitical make-up are overwhelmingly Southeast European. It is the third largest and third most populous island in the Mediterranean. It is located southeast of Greece, south of Turkey, west of Syria and Lebanon, northwest of Israel and Palestine, and north of Egypt. Its capital and largest city is Nicosia. Cyprus hosts the British-controlled military bases Akrotiri and Dhekelia, whilst the northeast portion of the island is de facto governed by the self-declared Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, which is separated from the Republic of Cyprus by the United Nations Buffer Zone.
The European Convention on Human Rights is an international convention to protect human rights and political freedoms in Europe. Drafted in 1950 by the newly formed Council of Europe, the convention entered into force on 3 September 1953. All Council of Europe member states are party to the convention and new members are expected to ratify the convention at the earliest opportunity.
Greek is an Indo-European language, constituting an independent Hellenic branch within the Indo-European language family. It is native to Greece, Cyprus, Italy, southern Albania, and other regions of the Balkans, Caucasus, the Black Sea coast, Asia Minor, and the Eastern Mediterranean. It has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning at least 3,400 years of written records. Its writing system is the Greek alphabet, which has been used for approximately 2,800 years; previously, Greek was recorded in writing systems such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary. The alphabet arose from the Phoenician script and was in turn the basis of the Latin, Cyrillic, Coptic, Gothic, and many other writing systems.
Self-determination refers to a people's right to form its own political entity, and internal self-determination is the right to representative government with full suffrage.
The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), also known as the Strasbourg Court, is an international court of the Council of Europe which interprets the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). The court hears applications alleging that a contracting state has breached one or more of the human rights enumerated in the convention or its optional protocols to which a member state is a party. The court is based in Strasbourg, France.
The Cyprus problem, also known as the Cyprus conflict, Cyprus issue, Cyprus dispute, or Cyprus question, is an ongoing dispute between the Greek Cypriot and the Turkish Cypriot community in the north of the island of Cyprus, where troops of the Republic of Turkey are deployed. This dispute is an example of a protracted social conflict. The Cyprus dispute stems from a Turkish military invasion of the island after a coup, and the presence of Turkish soldiers despite a legal reinstatement of a stable government. The desire of some of the ethnic Turkish peoples for the partition of the island of Cyprus through Taksim, and mainland Turkish nationalists settling in as a show of force as a supposed means of protecting their people from what they considered to be the threat of Greek Cypriots, also plays a role in the dispute.
This article covers the civilian casualties and displacements that occurred between 1963 and 1975 – from the outbreak of the intercommunal fighting until the end of displacements following the Turkish invasion of Cyprus.
The Turkish invasion of Cyprus began on 20 July 1974 and progressed in two phases over the following month. Taking place upon a background of intercommunal violence between Greek and Turkish Cypriots, and in response to a Greek junta-sponsored Cypriot coup d'état five days earlier, it led to the Turkish capture and occupation of the northern part of the island.
Civic nationalism, otherwise known as democratic nationalism, is a form of nationalism that adheres to traditional liberal values of freedom, tolerance, equality, and individual rights, and is not based on ethnocentrism. Civic nationalists often defend the value of national identity by saying that individuals need it as a partial shared aspect of their identity in order to lead meaningful, autonomous lives and that democratic polities need a national identity to function properly. Liberal nationalism is used in the same sense as 'civic nationalism', but liberal ethnic nationalism also exists, and "state nationalism" is a branch of civic nationalism, but it can also be illiberal.
The margin of appreciation is a legal doctrine with a wide scope in international human rights law. It was developed by the European Court of Human Rights to judge whether a state party to the European Convention on Human Rights should be sanctioned for limiting the enjoyment of rights. The doctrine allows the court to reconcile practical differences in implementing the articles of the convention. Such differences create a limited right for contracting parties "to derogate from the obligations laid down in the Convention". The doctrine also reinforces the role of the European Convention as a supervisory framework for human rights. In applying that discretion, the court's judges must take into account differences between domestic laws of the contracting parties as they relate to substance and procedure. The margin of appreciation doctrine contains concepts that are analogous to the principle of subsidiarity, which occurs in the unrelated field of EU law. The purposes of the margin of appreciation are to balance individual rights with national interests and to resolve any potential conflicts. It has been suggested that the European Court should generally refer to the State's decision, as it is an international court, instead of a bill of rights.
Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights provides a right to respect for one's "private and family life, his home and his correspondence", subject to certain restrictions that are "in accordance with law" and "necessary in a democratic society". The European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) is an international treaty to protect human rights and fundamental freedoms in Europe.
Greece–Netherlands relations are the bilateral relations between the Netherlands and Greece. Since 1834, both countries have diplomatic relations. The Netherlands have an embassy in Athens. Greece has an embassy in The Hague, and a consulate-general in Rotterdam. Both countries are full members of the Council of Europe, the European Union and NATO.
A sovereign state is a state that has the supreme sovereignty or ultimate authority over a territory. It is commonly understood that a sovereign state is independent. When referring to a specific polity, the term "country" may also refer to a constituent country, or a dependent territory.
Article 7 of the European Convention on Human Rights sets limits on criminalisation, forbidding ex post facto criminalisation by signatory countries.
Alan Vaughan Lowe is a barrister and academic specialising in the field of international law. Chichele Professor of Public International Law in the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, 1999–2012; Emeritus Professor of International Law and Emeritus Fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford, since 2012; visiting professor, University of Chichester, 2024.
Parliamentary sovereignty is an ancient concept central to the functioning of the constitution of the United Kingdom but which is also not fully defined and has long been debated. Since the subordination of the monarchy under parliament, and the increasingly democratic methods of parliamentary government, there have been the questions of whether parliament holds a supreme ability to legislate and whether or not it should.
In September 1967, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands brought the Greek case to the European Commission of Human Rights, alleging violations of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) by the Greek junta, which had taken power earlier that year. In 1969, the Commission found serious violations, including torture; the junta reacted by withdrawing from the Council of Europe. The case received significant press coverage and was "one of the most famous cases in the Convention's history", according to legal scholar Ed Bates.
Greece was not one of the ten founding members of the Council of Europe, but it was the first state to join, doing so three months later, on 9 August 1949. In 1953, the Hellenic Parliament unanimously ratified the Council of Europe's human rights treaty, the European Convention on Human Rights, and its first protocol. Greece filed the first interstate case before the European Commission of Human Rights, Greece v. United Kingdom, in 1956, alleging human rights violations in British Cyprus.
The living instrument doctrine is a method of judicial interpretation developed and used by the European Court of Human Rights to interpret the European Convention on Human Rights in light of present-day conditions. The doctrine was first articulated in Tyrer v. United Kingdom (1978), and has led both to different rulings on certain issues as well as evaluating the human rights implications of new technologies.
Right to truth is the right, in the case of grave violations of human rights, for the victims and their families or societies to have access to the truth of what happened. The right to truth is closely related to, but distinct from, the state obligation to investigate and prosecute serious state violations of human rights. Right to truth is a form of victims' rights; it is especially relevant to transitional justice in dealing with past abuses of human rights. In 2006, Yasmin Naqvi concluded that the right to truth "stands somewhere on the threshold of a legal norm and a narrative device ... somewhere above a good argument and somewhere below a clear legal rule".
