9. INTERNATIONAL PALANDOKEN SCIENTIFIC STUDIES CONGRESS
A POWERFUL BUT LIMITED TOOL TO DEFEND HUMAN RIGHTS: INDIVIDUAL APPLICATION TO THE CONSTITUTIONAL COURT
Protecting the fundamental rights and freedoms of their citizens is one of the main duties of states. Fundamental rights and freedoms are constitutionally guaranteed in our country. Turkey is a party to the European Convention on Human Rights, which is a fundamental document in the field of human rights and has also accepted the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights. Article 90 of our Constitution accepts the European Convention on Human Rights as part of our domestic law. As a result of the referendum held on September 12, 2010, amendments to Articles 148 and 149 of the Constitution granted the Constitutional Court the additional responsibility of examining individual applications, alongside its primary role of norm supervision. The primary reason for granting the right to individual application to the Constitutional Court was the alarming number of applications being made to the European Court of Human Rights. It must be acknowledged that the protection of fundamental rights and freedoms is an issue that should primarily be resolved within domestic law. Therefore, as in many other countries, our citizens were given the opportunity to apply to the Constitutional Court against rights violations committed by public authorities before taking their cases to the European Court of Human Rights. The individual application is an extraordinary, exceptional, and subsidiary remedy within our legal system, designed as a last resort after exhausting ordinary domestic legal avenues. The right to individual application to the Constitutional Court is, in theory, an important mechanism for protecting citizens' fundamental rights and freedoms. However, certain problems and shortcomings in practice reduce the mechanism's effectiveness. Key criticisms of the individual application include the length of the application process, the court's workload, the binding nature of decisions, the inability to make individual applications for violations directly arising from the law, and the fact that an unconstitutional law causing a fundamental rights violation cannot be annulled as a result of an individual application. In our study, we will first examine the theoretical foundations of the right to individual application, its practical functioning, and the problems encountered, and then critically evaluate the system's effectiveness and its compliance with the principle of a democratic rule of law.