Turkey up front in number of complaints before ECHR

Turkey has become the country with the highest number of complaints to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), according to statistics released by the Court on Thursday.

Court President Síofra O'Leary gave an overview of the Court's activities in 2022 at a press conference in Strasbourg, where the Court is based, and presented statistics for the past year.

The President said that at the end of 2022, there were about 74,650 applications pending before the Court and that 74% of the pending cases concerned five countries: Turkey, the Russian Federation, Ukraine, Romania and Italy.

Throughout 2022, a total of 20,110 applications to the ECHR for rights violations originated from Turkey, which represented 26.9% of the ECHR's total workload, DW Turkish said, adding that it was the first time that Turkey represented such an important workload for the ECHR.

Complaints related to arrests, trials, and civil service dismissals under the government's actions following the 2016 coup attempt accounted for half of the claims filed against Turkey.

At least one article of the ECHR was violated in 73 of the decisions handed down in the Turkish cases, there was no violation in five cases, and in the other two cases it was decided that a solution was found by other means.

In the decisions on violations related to Turkey, state institutions violated Article 5 of the ECHR on the right to security 27 times, Article 1 on the right to property 20 times, and Article 6 on a fair trial 19 times.

According to the ECHR, the number of consensual resolution in Turkey decreased from 167 in 2020 and 43 in 2021 to 10 in 2022.