The Need to Look Beyond the Right to Property: An Assessment of Constitutional Court of Turkey Judgements on Urgent Expropriations for Hydropower Plants

This article examines the prospects of litigation as a resistance strategy against authoritarian neoliberalism, which is also known for using law as a tool for furthering its developmental agenda. In this context, it focuses on the implementation of urgent expropriations (UE) for land acquisitions towards hydropower plant (HPP) projects in Turkey. Through an analysis of the approach of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) on environmental cases, and the rulings of the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Turkey (CCT) in individual applications lodged against UEs, this article demonstrates the limitations of liberal human rights framework in protecting ecological and cultural interests. These limitations are demonstrated in the approach of CCT in its assessments where it declines to address the claims of applicants concerning the right to live in a healthy and balanced environment. Thus, the article argues that while representing a liberal rationality with due regard of right to property of the individuals, compared to the neoliberal rationality biased towards business interests, the liberal human rights paradigm is still prone to excluding collective ecological and cultural values due to its individualistic and atomistic mindset. Therefore, the use of litigation as a resistance strategy against neoliberal authoritarian developmentalism offers only limited if any success.