Turkey’s Constitutional Court found at least one violation of human rights in each of 11,830 applications in 2021, according to updated statistics announced by the court on Monday, Turkish media outlets reported.
The Constitutional Court published the Individual Application Statistics for the September 23, 2012-December 31, 2021 period on its website. The statistics are updated quarterly.
The court received the highest number of individual applications — 80,756 — in 2016 following a coup attempt. The highest number of rights violations was announced in 2021, with the court finding at least one violation in each of 11,830 applications, doubling compared to 2020, when the court found at least one violation in each of 5,658 applications.
There are currently 59,017 pending applications at the Constitutional Court, corresponding to 17.6 percent of all applications.
The right to file an individual application with the Constitutional Court was introduced in 2012.
The court received 361,159 individual applications during the period in question and has announced its decision on 302,429 of them.
The court found 261,681 applications inadmissible, corresponding to 86.5 percent of its decisions, while announcing at least one violation in each of 25,857 cases.
In 2021 the court received 66,121 applications and processed 45,321 of them, finding at least one violation in 11,880 cases.
The right to a fair trial was the most frequently violated right, with 20,084 cases, corresponding to 76.8 percent of all violation decisions.
The right to a fair trial was followed by the right to own property with 2,983 violations, the right to respect for private and family life with 691 violations and freedom of speech with 663 violations.
Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), which has been ruling the country as a single party government since 2002, has been receiving strong criticism for putting the judiciary under its control and using judicial mechanisms to silence its critics.
Many say the country’s judiciary lost its independence further after the failed coup in July 2016 following which the AKP government launched a massive crackdown on non-loyalist citizens on the pretext of an anti-coup fight and removed 4,156 judges and prosecutors from their jobs for alleged membership in or relationships with “terrorist organizations” by emergency decree-laws subject to neither judicial nor parliamentary scrutiny.