An International Conference on the 10th Anniversary of Individual Application Mechanism in Türkiye was held on 23 September 2022 at Grand Tribunal Hall within the premises of the Turkish Constitutional Court under the EU-CoE Joint Project on “Supporting the Effective Implementation of Turkish Constitutional Court (TCC) Judgments in the Field of Fundamental Rights”.
Inaugurated by the keynote speeches of the President of the Turkish Constitutional Court, Zühtü Arslan, Director General of Human Rights and Rule of Law of the Council of Europe, Christos Giakoumopoulos and Head of Section of the Delegation of the European Union to Türkiye, Alexander Fricke, the event was attended by members and representatives of the high courts, various judicial organs and institutions and Council of Europe Strasbourg and Ankara Office representatives.
In his speech, Alexander Fricke, Head of Section of the Delegation of the European Union to Türkiye, touched upon the important role of the TCC in the protection of fundamental rights and underlined that the European Union would continue to support its partners in Türkiye to reach common goals in line with the core values of the Union.
Christos Giakoumopoulos, Director General of Human Rights and Rule of Law of the Council of Europe joined the event online. In his speech, he highlighted the importance of the cooperation with the TCC and other national actors in the better protection of human rights and thanked the President of the Constitutional Court, Zühtü Arslan for the ownership and commitment the TCC demonstrated in the implementation of the project.
President Arslan provided the statistics concerning individual applications to the TCC and gave examples from the recent case law of the TCC. He emphasised the importance of the objective effect of the Court’s judgments and its acceptance and implementation by all public institutions for prevention of future breaches of human rights in the country and thus, of repetitive applications lodged before the Constitutional Court.
The event continued with two thematical sessions on the right to individual application and redressing violations of human rights by individual application mechanism. National judge and Senior Legal Advisor from the European Court of Human Rights, as well as international and Turkish academics and legal experts from distinguished universities and research centres were among the speakers of the sessions. These sessions permitted the participants to discuss several technical issues such as filtering of individual constitutional complaints, assessment of the victim status and different approaches in calculation of the amount of just satisfaction. Attended approximately by 200 participants, the conference was concluded with the closing remarks of the Vice-President of the TCC, Hasan Tahsin Gökcan.
