The supervisory body of the European Convention on Human Rights is the European Court of Human Rights. All 47 member states of the Council of Europe are parties to the Convention. The Republic of Turkey has signed the Convention on November 4, 1950 and the Ratification Law No. 6366 dated March 10, 1954 was published in the Official Gazette dated March 19, 1954 and numbered 8662. The certificate of approval was submitted to the Secretariat General of the Council of Europe on May 18, 1954 and the Convention came into force on this date for the Republic of Turkey. The convention includes a limited portion of the civil and political rights guaranteed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This limited list of rights has been extended with additional protocols in Turkey. Each protocol binds the Turkish state in terms of these human rights.
Individual applications to the European Court of Human Rights must be made within six months after the exhaustion of all domestic remedies. However, with the entry into force of Additional Protocol No. 15 to the Convention, this period will be reduced to four months. Additional Protocol No. 15 of the European Convention on Human Rights was signed on June 24, 2013 and has not yet come into force. In order for the Protocol to take effect, all state parties to the European Convention on Human Rights must ratify the Protocol in their national assemblies. Until this process is completed, six months rule shall be applied to the European Court of Human Rights to make an individual applications after the exhaustion of all domestic remedies. In addition, according to Article 7 of the Protocol, the effective date is the first day of the month following the expiration of a three-month period from the date of ratification by all member states. The Republic of Turkey signed this Protocol on September 13, 2013.
Our legal consultancy and advocacy services comprise these operations: The application to the European Court of Human Rights for alleged violations of human rights and freedoms guaranteed by the European Convention on Human Rights and additional protocols to which Turkey is a party; determining whether domestic legal remedies have been consumed before the application is made; determining that an individual application has been made to the Constitutional Court or not, which is considered as an effective domestic legal path in this regard; reviewing the case files related to the trial in the degree courts; checking the compliance of the application with the criteria of acceptability and the intervention subject to the violation includes the follow-up of the application made in person or through a representative before the European Court of Human Rights such as preparing a response to government opinions.