Turkish Court Orders Return of Assyrian Foundation's Property

An ?stanbul court has ordered that a large piece of land that had been confiscated from the Assyrian Kadim Meryemana Church Foundation in the 1970s be returned, according to a Thursday report in the Radikal daily. The ?stanbul 7th Administrative Court last week ordered the return of the immovable property on which the Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University's Faculty of Fine Arts department now sits in ?stanbul's Bomonti neighborhood, on the grounds that the Undersecretariat of Treasury violated the property rights of the Assyrian Kadim Meryemana Church Foundation by canceling the certificate of ownership of the immovable property belonging to the foundation. Lawyers representing the foundation complained that the previous decisions by the courts had deprived them of property that they had acquired through donations, as a Turkish court had ruled that the 1936 Law on Foundations did not give them the right to acquire immovable property. The land was donated to the Assyrian Kadim Meryemana Church Foundation in 1956. In the same year, the foundation applied to an ?stanbul court to make the donation official and the court declared that the foundation was the legal inheritor. Yet the Undersecretariat of the Treasury applied to the ?stanbul 12th Penal Court of Peace in 1970 for the annulment of the foundation's right to be the legal inheritor. The court announced in the same year that the property right of the foundation was canceled on the grounds that foundations were not allowed to claim any property apart from that which they had declared in 1936, the year in which the 1936 Law on Foundations was introduced. Upon the court's decision, the land was handed over first to the Turkish Tobacco and Liquor Administration (TEKEL) in 1976 and then to Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in 2000. The confiscation of property belonging to foundations run by minorities dates back to the early days of the Turkish Republic. The 1936 Law on Foundations, known as the 1936 Declaration, ordered all foundations to submit a property declaration listing immovable and other property owned by each and every foundation. In the 1970s, the General Directorate of Foundations asked non-Muslim foundations to resubmit their declarations. Yet those foundations did not have such declarations because of the practice during the Ottoman Empire of only allowing such foundations to be established by an individual decree of the sultan of the day. After the these foundations refused to provide their declarations and made complaints, the General Directorate of Foundations made a ruling that the declarations of 1936 would be considered their declarations. Where these declarations did not carry a special provision entitling the foundation to acquire immovable property, the General Directorate expropriated all the immovable property acquired after 1936.