Information Note on the Court’s case-law No. 93
January 2007
Yumak and Sadak v. Turkey - 10226/03
Judgment 30.1.2007 [Section II]
Article 3 of Protocol No. 1
Choice of the legislature
Free expression of opinion of people
Requirement for political parties to obtain at least 10% of the vote in national elections in order to be represented in Parliament: no violation
[This case was referred to the Grand Chamber on 9 July 2007]
Facts: In the parliamentary elections of November 2002 the applicants stood as candidates for the political party DEHAP (People's Democratic Party) in an electoral constituency formed from a single province. Their party received 45.95% of the votes cast in the province (47,449), but only 6.22% of the national vote. As the Law of 1983 on the election of members of the National Assembly provides “Parties may not win seats unless they obtain, nationally, more than 10% of the votes validly cast”, the applicants were not elected. Out of the three members' seats allocated to the province, two went to another party which had obtained 14.05% of the votes (14,460) and one to an independent candidate who had obtained 9.69% of the votes (9,914).
Law: The 10% threshold required of political parties in order for them to be represented in parliament was provided for in a law which had been enacted well before the elections concerned, so that the applicants could have foreseen that if their party did not cross the threshold they could not win seats in parliament, regardless of the number of votes won in their electoral constituency. The aim was to avoid excessive and debilitating parliamentary fragmentation, and thus strengthen governmental stability, regard being had in particular to the period of instability which Turkey had gone through in the 1970s. The electoral system concerned, which had a high threshold without any possibility of a counterbalancing adjustment, had produced in Turkey, after the elections in question, the least representative parliament since the introduction of the multi-party system (45.3% of the electorate - about 14.5 million voters - being completely unrepresented in parliament). However, an analysis of the results of the parliamentary elections held since the adoption of the threshold showed that it could not as such block the emergence of political alternatives within society. The threshold was intended to give small groupings the opportunity to establish themselves nationally and thus form part of a national political project. In addition, the Constitutional Court had not ruled the threshold unconstitutional.
In view of the extreme diversity of electoral systems adopted by the Contracting States, and taking into account the fact that many countries using one or other variant of proportional representation had national thresholds for election to parliament, the Court accepted that the Turkish authorities and Turkish politicians were best placed to assess the choice of an appropriate electoral system. The threshold applied was the highest in Europe and it was therefore desirable for it to be lowered, although in this area the national decision-makers had to be allowed sufficient latitude. The Court also stressed the fact that the electoral system was the subject of much debate within Turkey and that numerous proposals of ways to correct the threshold's effects were being made both in parliament and among leading figures of civil society. In addition, the Constitutional Court had stressed that the constitutional principles of fair representation and governmental stability necessarily had to be combined in such a way as to balance and complement each other. Accordingly Turkey had not overstepped its margin of appreciation, notwithstanding the high level of the threshold complained of.
Conclusion: no violation (five votes to two).
© Council of Europe/European Court of Human Rights
This summary by the Registry does not bind the Court.
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