TURKEY WORST OFFENDER AT EUROPEAN COURT IN 2007
Today’s Zaman
Jan 24 2008
Turkey
Turkey was the worst offender at the European Court of Human Rights,
with its government found guilty of human rights violations in 319
cases in 2007, notably concerning the right to a fair trial and the
right to liberty and security, a survey said yesterday.
Russia followed Turkey with 175 cases involving rights violations,
according to the court’s annual survey. Four countries — Russia,
Turkey, Romania and Ukraine — accounted for more than half of the
court’s outstanding cases, reflecting their citizens’ lack of trust
in national courts.
There has been a notable decline in the number of applications
to the European Court of Human Rights concerning torture and the
right to life in past years as part of the government’s policy of
zero-tolerance for torture. But despite overall improvement in its
human rights record, Turkey, a candidate to join the European Union,
is still heavily criticized at home and by the 27-nation bloc for
persisting restrictions on freedom of expression. Article 301 of the
Turkish Penal Code (TCK), under which a number of Turkish intellectuals
including Nobel Prize winner novelist Orhan Pamuk and slain Turkish
Armenian journalist Hrant Dink had been tried, is particularly at
the heart of the criticism.
The survey also revealed that the European Court of Human Rights is
facing a huge case backlog and at its current pace would need 46 years
to rule on all complaints. The court, underfunded and lacking judges,
is struggling with almost 80,000 cases, some of them pending from
the mid-1990s, according to the survey.
Last year, the court issued 1,503 verdicts and threw out more than
27,000 complaints, the survey found. Its budget for 2007 was 49.6
million euros ($72 million) — inadequate for dealing with the
deluge of cases, according to Slovak Foreign Minister Jan Kubis,
whose country holds the rotating Council of Europe presidency.
As a final appeals court for European citizens, the Strasbourg-based
court hears cases challenging national courts’ decisions that
plaintiffs claim infringe on the 1949 European Charter of Human Rights,
which applies in all European countries but Belarus.
Implementing the European court’s rulings, however, can sometimes
take years, as the court cannot directly enforce compliance.
The court has become popular with citizens of Eastern European and
Balkan countries.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
