President of the Constitutional Court Mr. Zühtü Arslan and the accompanying delegation paid a study visit to Venice on 16 December 2022 within the scope of the “Project on Supporting the Effective Implementation of the Constitutional Court Judgments in the field of Fundamental Rights”, which is undertaken through joint initiatives of the Turkish Constitutional Court and the Council of Europe.

President Zühtü Arslan was accompanied by Justices, Deputy Secretary General and Chief Rapporteur-Judges and Rapporteur-Judges of the Constitutional Court.

During the study visit, the delegation of the Constitutional Court took part in the meetings where the justices of the Italian Constitutional Court, the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany and the Constitutional Court of North Macedonia, as well as the professors of constitutional law and human rights were also present. At these meetings, the experiences related to the protection and promotion of fundamental rights in Türkiye, Italy, Spain, Germany and the Balkans were discussed. President Arslan, delivering a speech on the first day of the meeting, stressed that the Turkish Constitutional Court was the guarantor of constitutional values, most notably basic rights and liberties of individuals.

Stating that in protecting the constitutional rights, the Court employed two main mechanisms, President Arslan noted that ever since its establishment in 1961, the Court had been reviewing the constitutionality of laws and decree laws and as well as presidential decrees, and that the Court had the power to review the acts of the legislature and the executive.

President Arslan stated that the Court’s case-law in terms of both constitutionality review and constitutional complaint laid down the standards to protect constitutional rights in line with the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights and also added “Since Article 148 of the Constitution clearly refers to the European Convention, the Constitutional Court takes into account the case-law of the Strasbourg Court in deciding constitutional complaints”.

Stressing that the Court achieved two main objectives in introducing the individual application mechanism, President Arslan noted that these purposes were to increase the standards for the protection and promotion of individual rights and liberties and to reduce the number of the applications and violations against Türkiye before the Strasbourg Court.

He also stated that there were two formidable challenges to the effective and successful implementation of the constitutional complaint system in Türkiye. He accordingly noted that the Court faced an incredible and incomparable workload concerning individual applications, and that there were currently 100 thousand pending applications before the Court. In this sense, President Arslan indicated that the devastating effect of this workload could better be understood by comparing it to the workload of the European Court of Human Rights, which currently had about 75 thousand pending applications from 47 different state parties.

President Arslan, noting that the effective enforcement of the violation judgments constituted second major challenge before the Court, like the Strasbourg Court, the Constitutional Court also adopted “the pilot judgment procedure” in cases where an application raised a systematic and structural problem causing massive and repetitive violations.

During his speech, President Arslan also touched upon the effects of the judgments and decisions of the Turkish Constitutional Court. In this sense, he emphasised that the judgments of the Turkish Constitutional Court were binding for not only parties of the case, but also for everyone. He stated “The Constitutional Court is simply saying that it cannot possibly afford to redress each and every violation in the country. Therefore, we have to take preventive measures such as following the interpretation of the Court in dealing with similar cases”.

Ending his speech, President Arslan stressed that a decade of experience in employing the constitutional complaint mechanism proved that it was an effective and successful remedy for violations, and that the future success of this remedy rested not only with the Constitutional Court, but also all other stakeholders, especially other courts.