London-based rights campaigners Tuesday welcomed a European court judgment requiring Turkey to pay compensation to a family of Kurdish orphans whose parents and a sibling were killed in front of them by armed men. 

The Kurdish Human Rights Project (KHRP) said that last week's ruling by the European Court of Human Rights that the Turkish government should pay US$160,000 in damages to the 10 surviving members of the Onen family was a "major victory." 

"It is a victory not just for the children, but for the entire Kurdish community," said Sally Eberhardt, a spokeswoman for KHRP, which has been strongly critical of Turkey's treatment of its Kurdish community, which makes up 12 percent of the population. 

The European Court ruled last Tuesday that two articles of a regional human rights treaty had been violated when armed men, who were initially identified as Turkish soldiers, raided the Onen's family home, in southeastern Turkey, and killed Ibrahim and Mome Onen and their son, Orhan Onen. 

The victims of the 1993 attack were deprived of the right to life and the right to an effective remedy, guaranteed under Articles 2 and 13 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the Strasbourg-based court found. 

While the Turkish government denied responsibility for the attack, saying that members of the rebel Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) were behind the killings, the court rejected that claim. However, it ruled that there was insufficient evidence to prove the assailants were government soldiers. 

Judicial authorities held a series of fact-finding hearings in Turkey's capital Ankara during 1998, five years after the case was first filed in September, 1993. They concluded that the government's version of the attack was "unsubstantiated and contradicted by substantial evidence." 

The court also uncovered a number of "grave deficiencies" with the police investigation into the case--which was conducted without photographs of the crime scene or recordings of eye-witness statements--and ruled that it was "undisputed" that the deaths were the result of a premeditated plan to kill Orhan Onen. The motive behind the killings was not established. 

The ruling comes at the end of a nine-year battle waged on behalf of one of the Onen daughters, Semse Onen, by lawyers working with KHRP, which campaigns for the rights of Kurdish populations living in Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and the former Soviet Union. 

According to KHRP, over 30,000 Kurdish people have been killed since 1984 when the PKK began an armed insurgency against the government for increased self-determination in the southeast of the country.