Turkey's top court receives nearly 300,000 rights violations complaints in eight years

Duvar English

Some 300,000 individual petitions about human rights violations were made to Turkey's Constitutional Court since the personal application process was launched in 2012, the daily Birgün reported on Jan. 17. 

The mechanism of individual petitions to the Constitutional Court mandates that the person applying must have exhausted all other legal means to solve their problem, meaning that they've failed to find justice in lower courts. 

The top court ruled on 257,108 of these petitions, it reported, noting at least one rights violation in 14,027 of the applications, and ruling for an administrative dismissal on 12,223 applications.

An overwhelming 228,855 of the almost 300,000 petitions were ruled inadmissible by the court.

The right to a fair trial was the freedom that was violated the most often among the cases that were ruled on, with a violation being observed in 63.3 percent of the 14,027 applications where a right was compromised. 

Property rights were the second most commonly violated, although it still only showed up in 19.2 of rulings, followed by violations of the freedom of expression, seen in 4.2 percent of cases. 

Out of the 14,027 applications the court ruled on, they decided a right was not violated in only 738 petitions.

The largest number of individual petitions to the court were made in 2016, when a failed coup attempt prompted Ankara to lay off thousands of public workers with state of emergency decrees to "cleanse the government of coup plotters."

Protection of privacy, maltreatment, and the right to freedom and safety were among the violations the top court recorded since 2012.