Turkish independent lawmaker Mehmet Yeneroğlu has accused Justice Minister Yılmaz Tunç of deceiving the public by falsely portraying Turkey’s compliance rate with rulings from the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), according to the Stockholm Center for Freedom, citing Bianet.
Tunç recently asserted that Turkey complies with 91 percent of the European rights court’s decisions. However, Yeneroğlu countered that the real measure of compliance lies in a country’s record on “leading cases,” which highlight structural or systemic issues requiring judicial or legislative reform.
The ECtHR classifies leading cases as those that expose significant shortcomings in national laws or practices, often compelling governments to enact reforms or new safeguards to prevent similar violations in the future.
In a parliamentary question to Minister Yılmaz Tunç, lawmaker Mehmet Yeneroğlu stated that Turkey has implemented only 68 percent of rulings in leading cases—13 points below the European average—ranking the country 39th among the Council of Europe’s 47 member states, according to official data.
Although Turkey’s overall compliance rate appears to be around 90 percent, Yeneroğlu noted that the country still has 448 unimplemented judgments, compared to Belgium’s 25, despite having a similar compliance percentage.
He also pressed Tunç on when the government intends to implement key ECtHR rulings such as Demirtaş, Kavala, Yalçınkaya, and Demirhan, all of which address systemic human rights violations.
Turkey currently tops the list of countries with the most pending cases before the ECtHR, with 21,800 applications awaiting judgment—accounting for 34.7 percent of the court’s total caseload, according to recent court data.
Rights advocates argue that these figures reveal the deep fragility of Turkey’s judicial system, weakened by years of repression, institutional decline, and politically driven prosecutions under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government.
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