Greece violates legal obligations regarding Turkish minority rights

Turkey has called the Greek decision to close the schools "discrimination”

Greece's Turkish minority has been experiencing numerous problems as a result of Athens' systematic policies, which aim to assimilate them in violation of the country's bilateral and international legal obligations. Arguably, the area of education is where this state of affairs is most obvious, Qazet.az reports.

Currently, Greece's 150,000-strong Turkish minority, which is generally concentrated in the country's Western Thrace region, is being targetted and turned into second-class citizens in a region where they have lived for over six centuries.

The Treaty of Athens, signed in 1913 between the then-Ottoman Empire and the Kingdom of Greece, is the first essential legal assurance that addressed the education of the Turkish Muslim minority in Western Thrace. Protocol 3, Article 15 of the treaty protocol recognized the minority's right to education in the Turkish language.

Article 40 of the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne affirmed that the minority is entitled to open and operate minority schools in which education is offered in Turkish. Moreover, Articles 9 and 41 of the same treaty say the Greek state must facilitate the minority's education in its own language (Turkish), with the required funding allocated from local state authorities and administrations.

Furthermore, Greece, in 1954, in decree 3065, recognized the minority schools in Western Thrace as "Turkish schools" and allowed the opening of more such schools, including Celal Bayar Middle and High School in Gümülcine (Komotini).

However, seeing its Turkish Muslim minority as a "hostage" to ties with Turkey, Greece started to violate the minority's right to education in defiance of its own international legal obligations from the early 1960s onward. With the far-right Greek military junta of 1967, the oppression of the minority became more obvious and heavier. Through decree 1109 in 1972, the junta decided not to use "Turkish" to denote the minority in a motion rejecting the Turkishness of the Turkish Muslim minority in Western Thrace.

Even though the junta was toppled in 1974, its mistreatment of the Turkish minority was taken over and continued by successive democratically elected Greek governments. As such, through decrees 694 and 695 in 1977, Greece made the employment of teachers educated in Turkey practically impossible. It also disempowered the minority school committee in the hiring of teachers.