Turkey paid 148.18 million lira ($3.25 million) in compensation for rights violations in the first four months of 2026, already exceeding the full-year total for 2025, according to Treasury and Finance Ministry budget data, Turkish Minute reported, citing journalist Çiğdem Toker.
The payments are listed in the central government budget under “individual application compensation payments,” a category covering compensation awarded after applications to the Constitutional Court.
Payments totaled 8.39 million lira in January, 24.52 million lira in February, 58.77 million lira in March and 56.5 million lira in April.
The four-month total was more than three times the 47.16 million lira paid in the same period of 2025.
For all of 2025 individual application compensation payments stood at 111.5 million lira, meaning the amount paid between January and April 2026 exceeded last year’s full-year total by about 36.7 million lira.
The increase follows a fall after a record year in 2023, when the government paid 1.35 billion lira under the same budget item. Payments dropped to 155.9 million lira in 2024 and 111.5 million lira in 2025.
Turkey’s individual application system allows people to take alleged violations of fundamental rights and freedoms to the Constitutional Court after exhausting domestic legal remedies. The mechanism entered into force on September 23, 2012, and is a domestic remedy that many applicants must use before taking cases to the European Court of Human Rights.
The Constitutional Court’s latest published statistics show the scale of the caseload. Between September 23, 2012, and December 31, 2025, the court received 714,774 individual applications and concluded 623,088 of them, leaving 91,686 pending. Its completion rate was 87.2 percent, according to Turkey’s state-run Anadolu news agency.
The court found at least one rights violation in 82,753 of the concluded applications.
The payments can arise from material or non-pecuniary damages, depending on the nature of the violation. Toker said the increase reflects not only the number of applications but also the type of claims and the size of awards.
One major category is the right to trial within a reasonable period of time, a recurring problem in Turkey’s judicial system. In such cases, the length of proceedings itself can lead to a rights violation ruling and compensation.
The Constitutional Court said in a 2022 judgment that the lack of an effective remedy for complaints about lengthy proceedings violated the right to an effective remedy in connection with the right to trial within a reasonable period of time.
Toker said the court takes inflation and changes in purchasing power into account when setting compensation, especially in cases involving lengthy trials.
The institution responsible for payment depends on the nature of the compensation. In cases involving the right to trial within a reasonable period of time, compensation ordered by the Constitutional Court is paid by the Justice Ministry.
The figures show how rights violation rulings and delayed trials translate into public spending as the Constitutional Court continues to handle a large backlog of individual applications.
