Turkey is by far the worst violator of human rights

ECtHR: Turkey holds the title of ‘worst human rights violator’

28 January 2011, Friday / ABDULLAH BOZKURT , STRASBOURG

In an annual report released on Thursday, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), the top judicial body to rule on human rights violations in Europe, once again found that Turkey is by far the worst violator of human rights among the 47 signatory states of the European Convention on Human Rights.

In statistical data on violation judgments by country for the last year, Turkey once more topped the chart with 18.55 percent of all violation judgments, practically the same as last year's figure of 18.81, followed by Russia with 14.48 percent and Romania 9.54 percent. In 2010, a total of 278 judgments were entered for Turkey and only in nine cases did the court find no violations.

The most common human rights violation committed by Turkey was against Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which concerns the right to a fair trial (42 cases) and lengthy proceedings (83 cases). This article was often raised as the reason for the rulings against Turkey.

In recent rulings, the court found that in most cases Turkey was in breach of this article and noted lengthy trials as a violation the convention. There have been excessive delays in violation of the “reasonable time” requirement in civil and criminal proceedings taking place in Turkish courts. The similar high-count cases originating from the violation of this article can be seen in other countries as well. In total, Article 6 violations represented 37.6 percent of court judgments in 2010, which made it the most-violated article of the convention.

Article 5, which talks about the right to liberty and security, was the second most-cited article in judgments filed against Turkey last year. The overwhelming number of these cases had originated in the ‘90s, during which decade gross human rights violations were committed by state security forces in the fight against the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party’s (PKK) terror campaign. The court found Turkey in violation of this article in 80 cases in 2010 alone. The court registry recorded no friendly settlements by Turkey last year.

In terms of pending applications, as of Jan. 1, 2011, the report found that Turkey has the second-highest number of complaints filed against it, with 10.9 percent of the total 139,650 applications. Russia led the pack in this category with 28.9 percent of the applications. Romania ranked third with 11,950 pending cases before the court, which corresponds to 8.6 percent of all cases.

The report unequivocally finds that in recent years there has been an upward trend for Turkey in terms of applications currently being reviewed by the court. A large number of cases was transferred from the previous year and are awaiting a decision. In 2009 Turkey had 4,474 applications at the court, while the number was 3,706 for 2008 and 2,828 for 2007. This number jumped to 5,821 in 2010, during which time 3,296 cases were declared either inadmissible or were stricken from the court.

The only good news for Turkey in the report by the ECtHR is that Turkey performed much better compared to other countries when factoring population figures in. In that sense, Turkey is ahead of 22 member states of the Council of Europe, with a 0.80 average rate that calculates the number of applications to the ECtHR per 10,000 inhabitants. The European Convention on Human Rights, drafted in 1950, places Turkey under the jurisdiction of the ECtHR. In 1987 Turkey accepted the right of individuals to make applications to the ECtHR and in 1990 recognized the compulsory jurisdiction of the court. However Turkey has still not ratified some of the protocols of the convention despite having signed them.