Turkey’s top court reports spike in individual rights violation applications

Duvar English

Turkey’s highest appellate court AYM has released individual application statistics for the third quarter of 2024. Accordingly, the number of individual applications submitted to the AYM increased by 16,077, bringing the total to 53,734 cases. Of these, 42,549 cases were resolved.

The court’s “pending cases,” which include unresolved applications from previous years, did not decrease, according to reporting by the daily Cumhuriyet. The number of pending individual applications awaiting resolution was 32,226 in the first half of 2024. This figure rose to 43,973 in the third quarter.

The court recorded an increase in the number of cases in which it determined at least one rights violation. From 2012 to the first half of 2024, the court ruled in 74,574 cases where at least one right had been violated. By the third quarter of 2024, this number rose to 75,089, with an additional 515 cases identified.

Throughout 2024, the number of cases decided with at least one rights violation continued to rise. The court issued such decisions in 2,014 cases in the first half of the year and 2,529 cases in the third quarter.

The Constitutional Court found that the most frequently violated right in the judicial system was the “right to a trial within a reasonable time.” Data from 2013 to June 2024 showed that this right accounted for the majority of rights violations identified by the court.

Between 2013 and September 2024, the court ruled in 1,425 individual applications that “no right had been violated.” In these decisions, the court deemed the applications admissible but found no violation during the substantive review phase.