New Turkish law to spur dismissal of 567 cases at the ECtHR

Justice Minister Sadullah Ergin has said with the amendments to the Counterterrorism Law (TMK), 567 appeals to the ECtHR will have to be dismissed. As of the end of July, children who attend illegal meetings and demonstrations or distribute propaganda for outlawed organizations cannot be put on trial for charges of terrorism in high criminal courts. Their cases must be heard in special juvenile tribunals. As a result of these changes, hundreds of children who were sentenced to lengthy prison terms in the past will be released. The law also reduces the minimum prison sentence for anyone taking part in illegal protests from one-and-a-half years to six months.

The new bill is part of the Justice and Development Party’s (AK Party) democratic initiative project designed to boost the rights of Kurds and end the terrorism of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). The law was passed despite strong opposition from the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP).

Included in the changes is a reduction in the length of prison terms given to adults found guilty of attending a meeting or a demonstration with weapons, explosives or firearms or found with propaganda materials for an outlawed organization. The penalty for such charges was reduced from two to five years to between six months and three years.

Ergin also said that Turkey would see more advances if the constitutional amendment package is approved in the Sept. 12 referendum. For example, he said individual applications will be accepted by the Constitutional Court, which would lead to a decrease in the number of cases going to the ECtHR.

This view is also shared by Emin Aktar, head of the Diyarbakır Bar Association. “[An] individual’s right to apply to the Constitutional Court will open a different channel. If the top court uses that channel effectively, the number of applications to the ECtHR will drop,” he said.

In an annual report released in January, the ECtHR, the top judicial body on human rights violations in Europe, 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 violations by country for the period between 1959 and 2009, Turkey topped the chart with 18.81 percent of all violations, followed by Italy with 16.57 percent and Russia 6.34 percent. Within this timeframe, there were 2,295 court cases regarding Turkey and only in 46 did the court find no violations. The most common human rights violation committed by Turkey was the denial of the right to a fair trial. Italy scored second with 2,021 violations.

In terms of pending applications, as of Jan. 1, 2010, the report found that Turkey has the second highest number of complaints lodged against it with 11 percent of the total 119,300 applications. Russia led this category with 28.1 percent of applications. In its report, the court described Turkey as a “high case-count state.”