Is a legal crisis on the horizon in Turkey?

As if our current issues were not enough, I am concerned that we may soon be facing a legal crisis in Turkey.

 If the country is dragged into a clash with the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), both diplomatic relations and economic ones will be harmed.  

The issue is related to jailed journalists. The Constitutional Court has stepped aside in these cases, declaring itself unauthorized to rule due to the ongoing state of emergency. A case has now been taken to the ECHR, but Justice Minister Bekir Bozdağ has said the ECHR is unauthorized to rule unless "all domestic paths have been exhausted." 

Despite Bozdağ's statement, the ECHR has accepted the cases of jailed journalists Şahin Alpay and Ahmet Altan over the past two months, before waiting for Turkey's Constitutional Court to rule. 

Alpay and Altan are still in jail and the Constitutional Court has not reached a decision. This means that the ECHR has accepted a case before domestic remedies are exhausted. As Bozdağ said, it is true that the ECHR is not authorized to step in before all domestic remedies are exhausted. But what if a government is hampering or severely delaying domestic remedies? 

It is to prevent these possibilities that you can take your case to ECHR if domestic remedies are "effectively blocked from functioning." This is not my personal view.

The ECHR's Feb. 20, 1991, judgment in the case Vernillo vs. France stated that direct applications to the ECHR are possible when domestic remedies are not effective, suitable and accessible and are not likely to bear any result. 

There have been many other ECHR judgments against France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and many more against Russia and Turkey when the ECHR decided to review a...