A symposium titled “The Impact of the Turkish Constitutional Court’s Norm Review Decisions on Individual Applications” was held to mark the 14th anniversary of individual applications to the Constitutional Court. AYM President Kadir Özkaya announced that 756 thousand 726 individual applications had been filed since 23 September 2012, 648 thousand 410 of them had been concluded, and approximately 85.7% of the applications had been adjudicated.
Özkaya stated that approximately 40 thousand 769 applications had been filed in 2026 and that approximately 30 thousand applications had been concluded. Noting that 99.9% of the 86 thousand 849 violation judgments issued since 2013 had been implemented, Özkaya said that putting violation judgments into effect was important for the effective protection of fundamental rights.
Emphasizing justice, fairness and equality to judges and prosecutors, Özkaya said that justice was the foundation of the state and social peace. He also stated that the absence of buttons and pockets on judges’ and prosecutors’ robes carried significance in terms of their understanding of duty.
Why it matters
This picture shows that individual applications have become a central legal avenue for applicants in the examination of violations of fundamental rights. The existence of cases that have not been concluded, meanwhile, keeps the question of how the volume of applications and decision-making processes will be balanced on the agenda. The fact that nearly all violation judgments have been implemented demonstrates that AYM decisions have not remained merely declaratory and have produced concrete consequences for the relevant authorities. For this reason, the development concerns both people alleging violations of their rights and institutions responsible for implementing the decisions; the administrative and judicial processes through which the high implementation rate is maintained, as well as the timely conclusion of applications, remain among the outstanding issues.
Background
The president is not a new name in the FikirPilot archive: we have published 14 reports mentioning this name in the past 90 days; the most recent was dated September 22, 2026.