In Turkey, legal conflicts that arise out of the State’s intervention in the right to property are hardly a new problem.

Between 1959 and 2018, the ECtHR rendered 3128 judgments against Turkey, establishing that there had been a rights violation. Of those judgements, 660 (21%) established a breach of the right to property. Statistics on the Turkish Constitutional Court’s (TCC) judgments relating to the right to property are more alarming; 31% (2454 of 8036 judgments) of all judgments rendered within individual application procedure established a breach of the right to property. 

Since 2015, the Turkish Government has been using the Criminal Peace Judgeships (CPJ) and Turkey’s notorious Anti-Terrorism provision (Art. 314, Turkish Penal Code) to take over properties belonging to dissidents.

In this report, Leighann Spencer and Ali Yildiz document the Turkish Government’s intervention into the right to property, analyze its legality under international and national law, and conclude with recommendations.

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