or her family promptly. The unexplained disappearance of a family member, even for a short period, may cause deep anxiety.”399 In that case, a period of seven days of incommunicado detention was found to breach Article 8. 2.3.6 Relatives of victims of human rights violations 2 The European Regional System The Court has expanded the beneficiaries of the State obligation to conduct an effective investigation to include relatives of victims of enforced disappearances. In Kurt v Turkey,400 an application was made on behalf of a disappeared person and his mother. In respect of the disappeared man, the Court held that “the authorities have failed to offer any credible and substantiated explanation for the whereabouts and fate of the applicant’s son… They have failed to discharge their responsibility to account for him. Accordingly the Court… finds that there has been a particularly grave violation.”401 In respect of his mother, the Court noted that she had been “left with the anguish of knowing that her son had been detained and there is a complete absence of official information as to his subsequent fate. This anguish has endured over a prolonged period of time.”402 Her suffering was considered sufficiently severe for the Court to find a separate violation of Article 3. Following this decision, the Court has avoided opening the floodgate to claims from relatives, by imposing a number of conditions. In İpek v Turkey,403 the applicant alleged the unacknowledged detention and subsequent disappearance of his two sons during an operation conducted by armed forces in his village. The Court held that “the question whether a family member of a ‘disappeared person’ is a victim of treatment contrary to Article 3 will depend on the existence of special factors which gives the suffering of the applicant a dimension and character distinct from the emotional distress which may be regarded as inevitably caused to relatives of a victim of a serious human-rights violation.”404 Sarı and Çolak v Turkey, nos. 42596/98 and 42603/98, judgement of 4 April 2006, §36. Kurt v Turkey (1998), op. cit. See also Çakıcı v Turkey (1999), op. cit. 401 Kurt v Turkey (1998), op. cit., §128-9. 402 Ibid. In support of this finding, the European Court cited the UN Declaration on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, the HRC case Quinteros v Uruguay (1983), op. cit., the Inter-American Convention on Forced Disappearance of Persons, and case law of the Inter-American Court. 403 İpek v Turkey, no. 25760/94, ECHR 2004-II, judgement of 17 February 2004. 404 Ibid. §181. In this case, the applicant, like the mother in Kurt v Turkey (1998), op. cit., was present when the security forces took his sons, and he, not the State, had borne the weight of the investigation. Furthermore, his investigations were characterised by a systematic refusal to cooperate on the part of the Turkish authorities. The Court found that the father himself was the victim of a violation of Article 3 due to the anxiety he suffered as a result of not being able to ascertain the whereabouts of his sons. 399 400 83