Right to Self-determination of Kurds and Its Relation with Right to Self-defence

Sammanfattning: The subject of this thesis is “Right to self-determination of Kurds and its relation with right to self-defence”. Kurds are ethnic minority within countries of Iran, Turkey, Syria and Iraq, then in this thesis I discussed the right to self-determination of ethnic minorities in international law. On the one hand I argued, one of the main requirements for self-determination of ethnic minorities is grievances of ethnic minorities, thus, the situation of human rights of Kurds was studied in separate section to examine their grievances. On the other hand, I discussed right to rebel or self-defence as one of the important aims for asserting right to self-determination. Therefore, I discussed this thesis in four sections. ‘Section I’ focused on Kurds. Section II focused on the right to self-determination of ethnic minorities in international law. In this section, also I briefly studied right to self-determination in non-ethnic contexts such as right to self-determination of colonial people, entire population of an independent state and self-determination of racial and religious groups. In Section III, the definition of right to self-defence (right to rebel) was discussed. I reached to this conclusion that right to rebel is the exercise of right to self-defence of oppressed people and one of the important aims of right to self-determination. Section IIII focused on the situation of human rights of Kurds in Iran, Turkey, Iraq and Syria to examine whether Kurds historically have suffered from grave violation of their rights at the hands of the governments to be qualified for right to self-determination or not?