Turkey is ranked first in the number of violations of the European Convention on Human Rights in the 60-year history of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), statistics from the court show.

According to the statistics, which reveal the distribution of judgments by the ECtHR among signatory states between 1959 and 2019, Turkey, with 3,224 judgments, is by far the number one violator of the convention in terms of “judgments finding at least one violation.”

In this period the Strasbourg court delivered 18,997 judgments that found at least one violation of the convention. With these numbers Turkey accounts for almost 17 percent of all judgments in which at least one violation of the convention was determined. The Russian Federation and Italy follow Turkey with 2,551 and 1,843 judgments, respectively.

Turkey again ranks first in terms of “total number of judgments” with 3,645 cases, which means that Turkey is the country for which the Strasbourg court has delivered the most judgments. Turkey is followed by the Russian Federation and then by Italy, with 2,699 and 2,410 cases, respectively. In this period the European court delivered a total of 22,535 judgments.

Turkey, likewise, did not fare any better in terms of execution of ECtHR rulings, according to an annual report issued by the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe, which monitors the execution of ECtHR rulings.

According to the report, the total number of pending cases as of December 31, 2019 was 5,231, of which 1,245 were leading cases. Turkey has a backlog of 689 unexecuted cases, which follows Russia’s 1,663. Turkey had 184 new pending cases in 2019, following the Russian Federation’s registered 240 cases. Ukraine comes in third with 111 cases waiting to be executed.

The yearly report presents the status of execution of ECtHR judgments and decisions by respondent states. It also provides statistics and information on newly submitted cases, and pending or closed cases throughout the year. The top European rights court ordered Turkey to pay 2.17 million euros in damages in 2019, the report said.

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