Normative foundations of the right to individual complaint in Turkey with a case study on electoral rights

Abstract

The constitutional amendment of 7 May 2010 established the right of individual complaint before the Constitutional Court of Turkey (CCT), which was further specified in the new Act on the CCT. The explanatory statement motivating the constitutional amendment explicitly referred to the huge amount of complaints against Turkey before the European Court of Human Rights. The article analyses the three main dimensions of the normative foundations of individual complaint and highlights its underlying structural problems. A case study of 18 CCT decisions on active and passive voting rights elaborates on two main problematic issues in this regard.