The Turkish Constitutional Court rejected 96 percent of the 266,466 individual applications made in the last eight years. In only 8,659 of these petitions –amounting to 4 percent — did the court find at least one violation
Turkey’s Constitutional Court has published statistics on individual applications submitted to it between 2012, when the right to file an individual application to the court was introduced in the Turkish legal system, and March 31, 2020, according to which the court received 266,466 individual applications; 220,985 were concluded, while 45,481 are still pending before the court.
The right to a fair trial is the right most commonly violated, constituting more than half of all violations, the statistics showed. It is followed by the right to property. with a 30.5 percent share of the total.
The statistics further showed that individual applications to the Constitutional Court increased exponentially over the period, starting with 342 in 2012 and reaching 266,466 in eight years.
The Constitutional Court examines the constitutionality, in respect of both form and substance, of laws, presidential decrees and the Rules of Procedure of the Turkish Parliament.
Starting on September 23, 2012 the Constitutional Court was authorized to review individual applications with respect to fundamental rights and freedoms within the scope of the European Convention on Human Rights after the exhaustion of ordinary legal remedies. The purpose of the individual applications was to reduce the number of applications made to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR).
In that capacity the Constitutional Court acts as a “national court of human rights” and is recognized as a domestic remedy by the ECtHR.
