Turkish girl left with postoperative neurological damage suffered article 8 violation

The case concerned two high-risk operations performed on a patient which left her with severe neurological damage (92 per cent disability).

The applicants maintained that the authorities were responsible for the damage in question, and complained of the lack of an effective remedy by which to assert their rights in the civil proceedings.

They alleged that they had contested, without success, the relevance and sufficiency of the expert report on which the domestic courts had based their dismissal of the applicants’ compensation claim.

The court found, in particular, that the applicants had not received an adequate judicial response that satisfied the requirements inherent in the protection of the right to physical integrity of the patient.

The expert report on which the domestic courts had based their dismissal of the applicants’ compensation claims, and which concluded that the doctors had not been at fault, had given insufficient explanations regarding the issue on which it was supposed to provide technical insight (the issue whether the doctors had contributed to the damage).

Only where it was established that the doctors had carried out the operation in accordance with the rules of medical science, taking due account of the risks involved, could the damage caused be regarded as an unforeseeable consequence of treatment; were it otherwise, surgeons would never be called to account for their actions, since any surgical intervention carried a degree of risk.