In January 2010 the Parliamentary Assembly adopted Resolution 1704 (2010) on “Freedom of religion and other human rights for non-Muslim minorities in Turkey and for the Muslim minority in Thrace (Eastern Greece)”.
No official reply has been provided to the Assembly as of 15 March 2011.
Mr. Omtzigt
To ask the Committee of Ministers
to urge the governments concerned to transmit the requested progress reports to the Assembly before 10 April 2011, especially with respect to issues raised in paragraphs 16, 18 and 19 of the said Resolution.
When so doing, the Committee of Ministers is requested to obtain an appropriate reply to paragraph 19.6 in which the Turkish authorities are urged to "ensure that the Orthodox Syriac monastery of Mor Gabriel, one of the oldest Christian monasteries in the world, founded in 397 AD, is not deprived of its lands, and that it is protected in its entirety”. The Turkish state institutions have pushed through a number of legal cases against the monastery, whose grounds are now to be expropriated.