The Constitutional Court (AYM) has denied the application of Sarp Ruç, who was sentenced to imprisonment due to “insulting the President,” with a half-page decree. The high court decided that his freedom of expression was not violated. The full decree states:
“When the application was evaluated within the frame of the documents presented as well as within the limits of the Constitutional Court’s authority to examine individual applications, it was decided that there was no intervention or that an intervention did not pose a violation against the basic rights and freedoms protected by the Turkish Constitution.”
Ruç’s lawyer Özgür Urfa stated, “The court denied pages of application letters with four lines of decree. Apparently, they have denied the application right away without an examination after seeing that it was about “insulting the President.” Urfa further indicated that the Constitutional Court normally doesn’t evaluate such applications and that similar applications are awaiting evaluation at the Court for years. The lawyer stated that the number of concluded applications on the matter is two, including the one made by his client, and that both were denied by the court.
26.02.2020
bianet.org