Anayasa Mahkemesine Bireysel Başvuru Kararlarının İcrası

Abstract

Constitutional complaint mechanisms such as the individual application to the Constitutional Court represent the pinnacle of judicial protection of fundamental rights. These mechanisms, in a way, broke the shell of the constitutional justice, which had been limited to the review of the constitutionality of laws and norms having the force of law for a long time, and revitalized constitutional provisions, allowing them to flourish in the field of positive law. Like every revolution, this radical change in the constitutional justice has shaken the law of the countries it entered, causing tensions between the judiciary and other state organs, and especially within the judiciary itself. The fact that the purpose of the individual application, which was introduced into our law with the 2010 Constitutional amendments, was frequently portrayed as reducing the number of cases going to the European Court of Human Rights at that time seems to have led to this transformative power of the institution being overshadowed or even underestimated from the very beginning. For this reason, the issue of the execution of judgments, which in fact enables judicial protection to gain meaning, was not adequately addressed in the constitutional and legal provisions on the individual application and was neglected in the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court for a long time. Later on, the fact that the impact of individual application decisions was recognized through some controversial decisions of the Constitutional Court that are prominent in the public opinion and the resistance of relevant courts to comply with those decisions brought the issue of the binding authority and the execution of individual application judgments to the fore in legal and political debates and to be frequently addressed in academic works. This thesis, in this regard, does not intend to repeat the existing studies on the subject, which seems to have covered the issue extensively, or to redraw the constitutional and legal framework of the necessity to enforce the decisions, and compile the current decisions of the Constitutional Court on the subject with scientific methods. Instead, it elaborates on the substantive and procedural law aspects of the execution of individual application decisions, and aims to reveal the legal qualifications of the individual (reopening of legal proceedings, compensation, etc.) and general (pilot judgments, etc.) measures that ensure the execution of the decisions more accurately. In this respect, the study endeavors to be a practical guide in the execution of individual application decisions. The role of the Constitutional Court in the execution of its judgments is analyzed in three phases: before the judgment (through injunctions), during the judgment review and after the judgment. Finally, recommendations specific to each phase are provided to ensure an effective execution process.