High courts resist attempts to solve judiciary problems

Resisting new judge appointments

According to data from the Justice Ministry, there are 14,697 positions available for judges in the ministry and 3,796 of these were vacant as of January 2010. However, whenever the government tries to address the deficit of judges, which is one of the greatest problems facing the Turkish judiciary, the high courts and the main judicial bodies always raise objections.

When the Justice Ministry made a move to recruit 1,300 judges and prosecutors in 2009, the HSYK showed the utmost resistance to the government’s effort. A decree from Justice Minister Sadullah Ergin that was submitted to the HSYK in May of that year was accepted by the HSYK in October 2009. At that time, the HSYK, in a controversial move, focused all of its efforts on relocating the prosecutors conducting the investigation into an alleged coup d’état attempt instead of filling the vacant positions in the judiciary.

Deep problems in judiciary

According to 2008 data from the European Commission for the Efficiency of Justice (CEPEJ), there are 24.5 judges per 100,000 people in Germany, 16.6 judges in the UK and 28.4 in Greece while that number is nine in Turkey.

The average number of cases a judge takes on in Europe is 200, compared to 1,078 in Turkey. Turkey also follows Russia as the second highest source country for applications to the European Court of Human Rights. A majority of rulings by Turkish judges brought before the European court are found to be in violation of the European Convention on Human Rights. Turkey has the highest number of courtrooms in Europe, making it even more important to reduce its deficit of judges and prosecutors; however, the judiciary’s objections make it virtually impossible to carry out the necessary improvements.

Since 1935, Turkey’s judges and prosecutors have had to take examinations prepared by Justice Ministry bureaucrats. In 2007, the ministry made a change to the system, allowing the participation of one member from the Supreme Court of Appeals and the Council of State in the administration of the oral exam. It also changed the weighted averages in the overall score by decreasing the importance of the oral examination to allow for a more objective evaluation and increasing the importance of the written examination. However, the Council of State issued a stay of execution on this, ruling that oral examinations should be videotaped.

Mountains of files

The workload of the high judicial organs that resist the appointment of new personnel in Turkey is 10 times the European average. In Turkey, a judge hears about 1,078 cases, while a public prosecutor handles 1,874 cases annually. In the past 22 years, the workload for public prosecutor’s offices has increased by 324 percent. As of the end of 2009, the total number of case files being processed at public prosecutor’s offices was 5,443,037.

In the past 20 years, the Supreme Court of Appeals’ workload has risen by about 300 percent. In 2009, the Supreme Court of Appeals had to deal with more than 600,000 cases. The prosecutor’s office can only bring about 35 percent of the cases it gets to a conclusion annually. The average time needed for processing a document at a prosecutor’s office is 44 days. The situation is not much better for the Council of State, another primary opponent of judicial reform. In the past 20 years, the Council of State’s workload has risen by 402 percent. The average length of a trial at the Council of State is 400 days.

Courts of cassation still not established

In 2006, the AK Party prepared a draft proposal to set up regional courts of cassation in İstanbul, Bursa, İzmir, Ankara, Konya, Samsun, Adana, Erzurum and Diyarbakır to alleviate the workload of the judiciary, particularly that of the Supreme Court of Appeals. These would be intermediary courts between local courts and the Supreme Court of Appeals. However, the Supreme Court of Appeals saw the establishment of these courts as a threat to its own existence, and its president and secretary-general launched a major campaign against the proposed change, accusing the government of trying to take over the judiciary. In a press conference on Jan. 31, 2006, Supreme Court of Appeals Secretary-General Uğur İbrahimhakkıoğlu said: “The purpose of establishing courts of cassation is not to lighten the workload of the Supreme Court of Appeals as they say. If that was the aim, a more practical solution could have been found.”

The HSYK said it was a good idea to set up such intermediary courts, but has not yet made any appointments. In fact, no infrastructural preparations have been carried out to set up these courts.