There are almost 18,000 cases currently ongoing against Turkey, making it the country against which the second-highest number of cases has been filed. Turkey follows Russia, which has nearly 30,000 cases filed against it. The cases filed against Russia last year constitute 22 percent of the total caseload of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), while the cases filed against Turkey last year constitute more than 13 percent of the ECtHR caseload. Russia and Turkey were followed by Italy, Ukraine, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova, Poland and the UK, respectively.
The ECtHR will announce the final figures of 2012 at the end of January.
The total number of cases filed against Turkey in 2011 was 15,950. The ECtHR announced its judgments for 174 cases against Turkey in 2011 and ruled against Turkey in 159 of them. Turkey was the country with the highest number of violations of the ECHR in 2011, the third year in a row.
The ECHR, drafted in 1950, placed Turkey under the jurisdiction of the ECtHR. 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.
Turkey is likely to adopt a law that will establish a commission to review ongoing cases against Turkey at the ECtHR and decide whether to offer compensation to the plaintiffs in an attempt to decrease the number of cases before the court.
Justice Minister Sadullah Ergin in November explained the specifics of the proposal. He said that as of December 2011, the court had fined Turkey 2,404 times, finding it guilty of having violated a number of provisions of the ECHR since 1959, the year the country acknowledged the right of individual applicants to file cases with the European court. This makes Turkey the most frequently fined country by the European court, followed by Italy and Russia, the minister said. He said 493 of the rulings against Turkey were made due to lengthy trial periods, adding that exceeding a reasonable period in the judicial process is the main reason behind the frequency of the rulings against Turkey.