This paper investigates the two-way interaction between the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) and Kurdish legal activists during the internal armed conflict in the 1990s. While regional courts’ impact on human rights law and practice has been duly acknowledged in the scholarly literature, the ways in which domestic legal activism can transform a regional court need to be explored further. Drawing upon a total of 332 ECHR rulings on the conflict between the Turkish state and the PKK fighters, I argue that Kurdish-issue cases have heightened divisions inside the ECHR, as dissenting opinions have increased dramatically. Furthermore, allegations of torture and disappearances throughout the 1990s have led judges to rethink the political nature of their work: the ECHR has consistently found the Turkish state guilty of violations, but the verdicts have often pointed out procedural failures, thus sidestepping substantive questions about the role of systematic human rights violations as part of military tactics. This procedural focus, instead of avoiding politics, has in fact sharpened the political character of Court rulings.