TURKEY AND FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION IN THE LIGHT OF ECHR JUDGMENTS

Human rights, which are related to humans’ being able to realize themselves as honorable beings and to live humanely, reach a mutual agreement on “protecting” and “improving” all humans and states at an ideal level; whereas, they cannot provide stability in practice. Although a number of measures have been taken, both internally and externally, to prevent the violations of human rights, there has been an increase in the number of violations as well as an increase in the variety of those violations. This increase required the establishment of new control mechanisms by all means. European Court of Human Rights emerges to be the judicial body of these control mechanisms. The sphere of influence of the ECHR, which has recently gained popularity and is seen as the final point to bring justice by many citizens, has considerably expanded as a result of the number of members in European Council hitting 47. ECHR is a control mechanism established by European Convention of Human Rights. This study crystallizes the human rights at a conceptual level and statistically analyses a total of 207 judgments (cases) on freedom of expression, which resulted against Turkey in ECHR between the years 1987 and 2011. The data in question have been collected from HUDOC19 ECHR’s own database), and Ministry of Justice’s20 database.