NATIONAL PARLIAMENTARY HUMAN RIGHTS COMMITTEES AS HUMAN RIGHTS ACTORS: THE COMMITTEE ON HUMAN RIGHTS INQUIRY

Özet

There has been a growing international consensus on the importance of national parliaments in the protection and realisation of human rights. National parliaments may interpret and apply human rights especially when holding the executive to account and in the laws they make. Therefore, they should be seen as a key institutional element of domestic human rights systems. In today’s national parliament structures, parliamentary work is carried out mainly in parliamentary committees. In the context of human rights, mostly, a parliamentary committee with a specific human rights mandate is set up or such a human rights mandate is added to an existing committee’s remit. The United Nations and its organs have also recognized the importance and emphasised the potential contribution of national parliaments in a number of outcome documents. They underlined that the establishment of a parliamentary committee with an exclusive human rights mandate should be encouraged and included set of standards that cover the mandate, responsibilities, functions and composition of a parliamentary human rights committee. The Grand National Assembly of Turkey have established the Committee on Human Rights Inquiry with the Law No. 3686 in 1990 and it functions in accordance with this Law and the Rules of Procedure of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey. It is true that the existence of a specialised parliamentary human rights committee is important. However, there is also a need to ensure that national parliamentary human rights committees, in this case the Committee on Human Rights Inquiry, have adequate responsibilities, power, functions, mandate and working methods to realise and mainstream human rights in an effective way. Accordingly, with all these explanations, in this study it is aimed to examine whether the Committee on Human Rights Inquiry has necessary and sufficient powers and opportunities and whether it plays an active role in protecting and realising human rights. In the study, first, the importance of national parliaments and national parliamentary human rights committees in the context of human rights has been mentioned, then international developments at the United Nations level have been explained, and the Committee on Human Rights Inquiry has been discussed from different aspects such as authority, power, responsibility and working methods. As a result of the study, various suggestions have been made to make the Committee on Human Rights Inquiry more effective and functional.