The European Court of Human Rights agreed yesterday to hear an appeal by the Kurdish rebel leader, Abdullah Ocalan, against the death sentence handed down against him by a Turkish court.
A panel of judges said the court would hear Ocalan's complaint that he had not received a fair trial in Turkey and that his right to life, freedom of expression, religion and other rights had been violated.
The decision amounted to a first-round victory for Ocalan (51), who has fiercely fought the June 1999 death sentence from his prison cell on the Turkish island of Imrali.
In Ankara, Turkey's Justice Minister, Mr Hikmet Sami Turk, immediately downplayed the decision, while Ocalan's lawyers hailed it.
"We are happy with the court's decision. We were expecting it to agree to hear the complaints," the lawyer, Mr Hasip Kaplan, said in a phone interview.
The lawyer said that the referral of the case to a panel of 17 judges was an "acknowledgement of the importance of the case and its relation to an international problem".
But the justice minister said the decision by the Strasbourg based court only meant that the case would be heard. "The court will begin to hear the actual case later," Mr Turk said.
Ocalan, leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), was sentenced to death by a Turkish court in June 1999 for treason and separatism under the terms of a Turkish law covering "terrorist" acts.
Known to his followers as Apo, Ocalan was captured in February 1999 in Nairobi by Turkish agents in a coup hailed in Ankara as a decisive blow to the PKK's 15-year armed struggle for an independent homeland in south-east Turkey.
A ruling by the court in Strasbourg that Ocalan's rights had been violated would be a blow to Turkey's efforts to gain membership to the EU and other international institutions.
The Strasbourg judges said they would also examine the claim by Ocalan's lawyers that Turkey's judicial system had convicted him of "an action which did not constitute an offence at the time it was committed", and denied his right to "benefit from an effective recourse."
Turkey's president vetoed a limited prison amnesty, while over 1,000 inmates continued a hunger strike aimed at blocking plans to take control of the country's teeming, chaotic jails. The veto was a fresh blow to Turkey's fragile coalition government, which has had many of its decisions blocked by President Ahmet Necdet Sezer, a former senior judge backed by the Prime Minister, Mr Bulent Ecevit, for the presidency earlier this year.
In a six-page statement accompanying his decision, President Sezer said the amnesty, which could have halved Turkey's prison population of over 70,000, would have damaged respect for law and undermined the notion of justice.
An earthquake measuring 5.8 on the Richter scale hit western Turkey near the town of Afyon yesterday but there were no immediate reports of any casualties, local officials said. Anatolian news agency cited the country's main seismological measuring station as saying the quake measured 5.8.