Turkish Cypriot court hands down first ever conviction for homophobic hate crime

A Turkish Cypriot court has for the first time handed down a conviction and sentenced an individual for committing homophobic hate crimes, according to reports on Wednesday. News website Bugun Kibris reported that in September 2023, a man named Ergun Sunmez had “physically assaulted and threatened his ex-wife, Pinar Tas” at her flat in Trikomo, while at the same time “directing homophobic insults at Berna Numan, who was present in the flat at the time”. The Turkish Cypriot Trikomo district court found that the homophobic language directed towards Numan, which, it said, was also “audible” outside the flat, constituted a separate crime to the insults and threats he had said in Tas’ direction. It said that to qualify the offence as a hate crime, it “requires not merely a general intent to commit a crime, but a specific motive in the mind of het perpetrator, manifested as prejudice or hatred against one’s sexual orientation”. In his case, it said, the language used by Sunmez “clearly reveals that [his] aim was not to merely hurl insults in casual altercation, but to publicly marginalise, humiliate, and make [Numan] the object of hostility based on her constitutional right to freedom of sexual orientation”. Sunmez was sentenced to a total of six months in prison on September 24, with newspaper Ozgur Gazete reporting at the time that he and Tas had divorced five months prior to the incident, and that on the day, he had “gone to Tas’ house, attacked her, and threatened her with her life”. Tas then filed a case, reporting that she had been physically assaulted by Sunmez, obtaining a medical report documenting the incident. On Wednesday, Bugun Kibris reported that five months of the six-month sentence had been handed down on account of Sunmez’s assault on Tas, with one month handed down for the hate crime he committed against Numan. The Turkish Cypriot authorities were the last administration in Europe to legalise same-sex sexual activity, doing so on February 7, 2014, while also introducing anti-discrimination laws at the same time. However, same-sex couples at present still have no legal recognition, no right to adopt children, and homosexual males are discharged from the Turkish Cypriot security forces if their homosexuality is proven.