The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has asked the Turkish government whether the refusal to pay a retirement bonus to a civil servant dismissed by an emergency decree after a 2016 coup attempt amounted to a violation of his rights to property, a fair trial and an effective remedy.
The case concerns İbrahim Eren, who says he was denied the retirement bonus despite having made sufficient contributions, with domestic courts ultimately rejecting his claim.
Eren, dismissed from public service on September 1, 2016, began receiving his pension on September 1, 2017, but retirement bonus was not paid.
In Turkey, public servants who are entitled to a pension also receive a lump-sum retirement bonus, calculated based on their years of service.
After his application to the Social Security Institution was rejected in 2018, Eren challenged the decision in court. An Ankara administrative court initially ruled in his favor, finding that he had made sufficient contributions to qualify for the bonus. However, the Ankara Regional Administrative Court overturned the ruling in November 2020, saying that because Eren had been dismissed by an emergency decree he did not meet the conditions required to receive the payment.
Eren then filed an application with Turkey’s Constitutional Court, which rejected his case in June 2021, ruling that his claims were “manifestly ill-founded” and he did not have a “legitimate expectation” protected under property rights.
Eren then brought his case before the ECtHR, arguing that domestic courts rejected his claim solely because he had been dismissed by an emergency decree, without examining whether he met the statutory conditions required for the payment.
According to legal expert Kadir Öztürk, the Constitutional Court’s reasoning in Eren’s case differs from a more recent ruling issued in February 2025, in a similar case involving Fikret Aslan, who was also dismissed by an emergency decree. In that decision, the court found that Aslan had been unlawfully discriminated against when he was denied a retirement payment. The court invoked the constitutional protection of property rights, which guarantees individuals the ability to receive and retain legally accrued entitlements such as pensions or severance payments.
The Strasbourg court asked the Turkish government to address three questions: whether the judicial review of the bonus denial was “effective,” whether the bonus falls within the European Convention on Human Rights’ definition of “property” and whether Eren had access to an effective domestic remedy through which he could challenge the decision.
Following the coup attempt, the Turkish government declared a state of emergency that remained in effect until July 19, 2018. During this period, the government carried out a purge of state institutions on the pretext of an anti-coup fight by issuing a number of government decrees. Over 130,000 public servants, including 4,156 judges and prosecutors, as well as more than 24,000 members of the armed forces were summarily removed from their jobs for alleged membership in or relationships with “terrorist organizations” by emergency decree-laws subject to neither judicial nor parliamentary scrutiny.
