The applicant, Hamid Athary, is an Iranian national who was born in 1973 and lives in the Netherlands. He arrived in Turkey in December 2004 and, a political dissident in Iran, was granted a temporary residence permit pending his asylum claim. In 2007 he was convicted of a drugs offence and sentenced to 18 months’ imprisonment. His case essentially concerns his complaint that, following his release from prison in December 2008, he was immediately detained in the Kumkapı Foreigners’ Removal Centre. He was released from the removal centre in April 2010 when he left Turkey for the Netherlands where he had been granted refugee status. Relying in particular on Article 5 §§ 1, 2, and 4 (right to liberty and security) and Article 14 (prohibition of discrimination), he notably alleges that his detention in the removal centre was unlawful, that he was not informed of the reasons for his detention, that he had not had an effective remedy in domestic law to effectively challenge the lawfulness of his detention there and that, if he had been Turkish, he would not indeed have been detained there. Further relying on Article 2 (right to life), Article 3 (prohibition of torture and of inhuman or degrading treatment) and Article 13 (right to an effective remedy), he also complains that if deported from Turkey to Iran he would be at real risk of death or ill-treatment.
(citation from the official press-release prepared by the European Court of Human Rights)