Alien citizens

"Rethinking State Policies toward Religious Minorities On May 21, 1903, as an act of gesture, the Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II joined the Greek Orthodox Patriarch Joachim III to celebrate the grand opening of the Buyukada Greek Orphanage, which served to the Greek orphans of both late Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey until 1964. When Turkey had a tension with Greece over Cyprus in 1964, the state's General Directorate of Foundations (GDF, Vakiflar Genel Mudurlugu) closed down the 20,000-square-meter wooden historic orphanage, which is located in a touristic island in the Sea of Marmara. The GDF did not repair the building since then and left it to destitution without any restoration. In the 1990s, the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate started a legal process against the Turkish state to register the ownership of the property under its name. The Turkish state denied the claim and argued that the GDF had the right to seize the property because it had not fulfilled its original function for more than ten years. When the Council of State, the supreme administrative court in Turkey, dismissed the Patriarchate's claim in 2003, the case was carried to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). In 2010, the ECHR ruled in favor of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate and transferred the ownership of the property to the Patriarchate. In October 1989, Leila and Fatima Achaboun and their cousin Samira Saidani were expelled from Gabriel-Havez High School in Creil, a suburb outside Paris, for wearing headscarves on the school premises"-- Provided by publisher.