CoE slams Turkey for rights violations

In a report issued on Tuesday by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights, Marie-Louise Bemelmans-Videc, a rapporteur from the European People's Party group, said: “When analyzing the court's problems, we were informed that a small number of states dominate the Strasbourg court's backlog: Russia represents nearly 28 percent, Turkey 11 percent, Ukraine 8.6 percent and Romania 8.3 percent. These four states together represent roughly 57 percent of the backlog.” The ECtHR is overwhelmed with the backlog of cases as there are almost 120,000 applications pending before the court.

The backlog is increasing by almost 2,000 applications each month. What is troubling the court is that over 90 percent of these applications are inadmissible. The court is considering setting up a filtering mechanism made up of the judges of the existing court, based on a system of rotation among the judges, to deal with inadmissible cases and apply strict management procedures.

The PACE report asked national parliaments to play a key role in stemming the flood of applications by, for example, “scrutinizing draft laws to make sure they are compatible with [the European human rights] convention standards.” It also reiterated that “all national parliaments to introduce specific mechanisms and procedures for effective parliamentary oversight of the implementation of the court’s judgments on the basis of regular reports by the responsible ministries.”

The Venice Commission of the Council of Europe offers significant advisory services to member states to facilitate the adoption of structural and legislative changes domestically and issues opinions on the compatibility of national laws with the convention. The Venice Commission, in earlier reports, suggested that Turkey should introduce the ability for individuals to file complaints with the Constitutional Court and said this would help reduce the number of complaints coming to the ECtHR.

The report quoted former Legal Affairs Committee chairperson and former German Justice Minister Herta Däubler-Gmelin, who spoke at the Interlaken conference held in Switzerland in February to reform the ECtHR, during which she said that “a number of the court’s main ‘clients’ have made no serious effort to put into effect the 2000-2004 reform package.” Däubler-Gmelin asked whether the ministers attending the Interlaken conference will take the responsibility to “name and shame” states that have put into jeopardy the existence of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) system.

“We too, in the assembly, may need to seriously re-assess the manner in which we deal with such problems, especially with respect to non- or late implementation of court judgments by a growing number of states party to the convention, which puts the viability of the whole mechanism into jeopardy,” the report continued, asking PACE and the Committee of Ministers to take a more forceful stand to help the “big sinners.”

Bemelmans-Videc, the author of the report, warned that “if indeed the court is in a desperate situation, as the secretary-general and others have indicated, robust and effective use of the organization’s monitoring instruments must be resorted to. This was proposed by Mrs. Däubler-Gmelin, a solicitation that was clearly reiterated by the assembly’s president, Mr. Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, in his keynote speech in Interlaken.”

Another problem for the court is that approximately 50 percent of the admissible cases are “repetitive applications,” that is, cases raising issues that have already been the subject of court judgments in the past and which normally should have been resolved by the respondent member states. Turkey is partially blamed for this problem because higher judicial bodies in the nation have been constantly failing to reverse local court decisions that violate the ECHR. Though a 2004 amendment clearly made the convention superior to the national law in case of conflict, the remedy has often been ignored in practice and the number of cases originating from Turkey has increased rapidly.