Turkey, which has the highest number of applications pending before the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), attracted criticism after senior members of the Turkish judiciary attended the court’s judicial year opening in Strasbourg, Turkish Minute reported, citing the Bold Medya news website.
The visit sparked controversy and prompted backlash from legal experts and other critics.
Despite more than 3,000 violation judgments issued against Turkey remaining unimplemented, a high-level Turkish judicial delegation took part in a ceremony marking the opening of the new judicial year for the ECtHR.
The visit, announced by the Constitutional Court on social media, included the court’s president, Kadir Özkaya, Supreme Court of Appeals President Ömer Kerkez, Chief Public Prosecutor of the Supreme Court of Appeals Muhsin Şentürk, Council of State Chief Prosecutor Cevdet Erkan and Constitutional Court Secretary-General Murat Azaklı, among others.
During the program, Özkaya congratulated ECtHR President Mattias Guyomar on the opening of the new judicial year. The delegation also met with Turkey’s ECtHR judge, Saadet Yüksel, and Turkey’s permanent representative to the Council of Europe (CoE), Ambassador Nurdan Bayraktar Golder.
Criticism over unresolved violation judgments
The presence of senior members of the Turkish judiciary in Strasbourg drew particular attention, given the growing number of ECtHR rulings against Turkey that have not been enforced in recent years. Critics questioned whether the visit addressed the substance of those decisions or merely amounted to symbolic engagement.
According to ECtHR data, the court had about 53,450 pending applications at the end of 2025, with 18,464 of those applications filed against Turkey, which remained the country with the largest caseload before the court.
Economist and columnist Uğur Gürses shared images from the visit on X, commenting: “Photo of the day… Judges from a country where ECtHR and Constitutional Court rulings are not implemented visiting the ECtHR. So, what exactly did you say there?”
Liberal Democratic Party spokesman Engin Avcı, also a legal expert, echoed the criticism, saying that the visit would only make sense if ECtHR rulings were implemented. “If not, then you are simply traveling around at the public’s expense for nothing. It is a waste,” he wrote on X.
Lawyer Erkan Şenses pointed directly to Şentürk, recalling that while serving as head of the Supreme Court of Appeals’ 3rd Criminal Chamber, he upheld the conviction of Turkish philanthropist Osman Kavala despite an ECtHR ruling ordering his release and later filed a criminal complaint against members of the Constitutional Court over its decision concerning opposition lawmaker Can Atalay.
“If I were in his position,” Şenses wrote, “I would not walk past either the ECtHR or the Constitutional Court for the rest of my term.”
The long-running case of Kavala has become emblematic of Turkey’s failure to comply with ECtHR judgments. Jailed since 2017, Kavala is serving a life sentence despite a 2019 ECtHR judgment ordering his release. He was acquitted in 2020 but rearrested the same day and sentenced in 2022, with Turkish courts upholding the verdict. The CoE launched infringement proceedings in 2022, but they have yet to produce concrete results.
Atalay, a lawmaker from the left-wing Workers’ Party of Turkey (TİP), is serving an 18-year sentence that was upheld by the top appeals court in 2023 after his conviction in what’s known as the Gezi Park trial, concerning anti-government protests in 2013, labelled as a “politically motivated” trial by many. He was not released from prison despite two Constitutional Court rulings in his favor and was stripped of his parliamentary seat in 2024.
Another lawyer, Uğur Poyraz, ironically underlined the contradiction of the visit. “Since they’ve gone all that way,” he wrote, “they might as well tell the ECtHR president, ‘Don’t bother, we don’t implement your rulings.’ And the Constitutional Court president could add, ‘Don’t be upset, lower courts don’t implement ours, either.’”
Lawyer Mustafa Kemal Çiçek summed up the criticism by pointing to what he described as a cascading disregard for judicial authority within Turkey.
“The Constitutional Court does not recognize ECtHR rulings,” Çiçek wrote on X. “The Supreme Court of Appeals does not recognize Constitutional Court rulings. The political authority does not recognize Constitutional Court rulings, either.”
“Yet abroad, at cocktail receptions and official ceremonies,” he added, “they somehow all recognize one another.”
The backlash comes amid renewed scrutiny of Turkey’s compliance record following remarks by Petra Bayr, the newly elected president of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE).
Bayr recently warned that Turkey suffers from a lack of coordination among its high courts and described the situation as a “blockade that should not be there,” stressing that the problem ultimately requires action by parliament.
A majority of the ECtHR applications from Turkey were linked to detentions, arrests and trials tied to measures introduced after a coup attempt in 2016, affecting groups across the military, police, judiciary and public sector, with many cases involving alleged links to the faith-based Gülen movement.
Followers of the movement have faced a sweeping crackdown for the past decade after the Turkish government accused the group of orchestrating the coup attempt, an allegation it strongly denies.
