Turkey’s top court ruled that Ankara prosecutors violated a protester’s rights by failing to conduct a prompt and adequate investigation into the injuries he sustained during the 2013 Gezi Park protests but declined to reopen the case due to the statute of limitations, the Kısa Dalga new website reported.
The Constitutional Court found that the investigation into injuries sustained by a protester, identified only by the initials E.A.A., during a June 2, 2013 demonstration in Ankara was neither timely nor effective. The ruling, issued on March 20, 2025 by majority vote and recently made public, cited a violation of the procedural safeguards under the constitutional prohibition of torture and ill-treatment.
The Gezi Park protests began as a small environmental sit-in in Istanbul in May 2013 but quickly expanded into a nationwide wave of anti-government demonstrations, drawing a heavy-handed police response. Dozens were injured and several people were killed across Turkey in what rights groups condemned as an excessive use of force.
E.A.A. alleged that he was injured by police during a protest in Ankara and filed a complaint soon after. A 2015 forensic report confirmed that he sustained serious injuries that could not be treated with simple medical care. Nonetheless, the Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office closed the case in March 2015, citing a lack of sufficient grounds to prosecute.
Following this decision, E.A.A. applied to the Constitutional Court, which in January 2020 ruled that both his right to peaceful assembly and the constitutional ban on torture and ill-treatment had been violated. The court ordered that the case be reopened.
However, prosecutors waited more than a year before taking steps to relaunch the investigation. By the time the prior decision not to prosecute was overturned in June 2021, the statute of limitations on the alleged crimes had nearly expired. A fresh investigation was then halted in September 2021 on the grounds that the legal deadline to prosecute had passed.
In a second application filed in July 2022, E.A.A. argued that the delay and inaction by authorities effectively denied him justice. The Constitutional Court agreed, stating that the prolonged inaction enabled the suspects — police officers — to be afforded impunity.
“The prosecution waited approximately one year and four months to act after the initial ruling, during which time the statute of limitations expired,” the court noted. It also criticized the authorities for not taking steps, such as filing indictments, that would have interrupted the limitation period and demonstrated a serious intent to hold officers accountable. Despite this, the court ruled that a new investigation was no longer legally possible since the deadline to prosecute had already passed before its latest decision. It sent the ruling to the Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office
