On January 18, 2007, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) held that the militant Kurdistan Worker's Party (PKK) can appeal the 2002 decision of the Council of the European Union to include the PKK on its list of terrorist organizations. The court set aside a lower court ruling which held that Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan, now serving a life prison sentence in Turkey, cannot proceed with the appeal since the PKK no longer existed. The ECJ found that an "organization cannot, simultaneously, have an existence sufficient for it to be subject to restrictive measures laid down by the Community legislature and not have an existence sufficient to contest those measures."


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Learn more about the PKK from the JURIST news archive.

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