Complaining about the soaring number of individual petitions at Turkey’s Constitutional Court, acting president of the court Professor Engin Yıldırım said on Thursday that they are concerned about how to evaluate 100,000 petitions.
Yıldırım noted that the spike in individual petitions has occurred in the period following a coup attempt in Turkey, stemming from dismissals from state institutions in a subsequent purge. According to Yıldırım, since the introduction of individual complaints to the court in September 2012, the average number of files was 20,000, but as of November 2016 the number had already reached 45,000.
According to Yıldırım, with the new wave of purges, confiscation of private property and arrests carried out by the state, the number would reach 100,000 by the end of 2016.
The court’s acting president Yıldırım said that in comparison to Europe, the individual complaints they evaluate are extremely high and a huge problem.
Two members of Turkey’s constitutional court, namely Alparslan Arslan and Erdal Tezcan, were detained on July 16, arrested on July 20 in post-coup purge and dismissed from profession on August 4.