Event Title: Private Law Seminars / Publicity vs. Data Protection in Civil Litigation
by Asst. Prof. Dr. Orhan Emre Konuralp
Date: 1 April 2026
Time: 12:30 – 13:30
Venue: B 102
ABSTRACT
Public hearings are one of the core principles of modern judicial systems. As a result of this principle, the public can be informed about court proceedings and judicial decisions. At the same time, however, the parties to a case often have to share personal or confidential data with the courts, and the public nature of proceedings creates the risk that such information may become known to third parties. For this reason, regulations about publicity have always included provisions allowing proceedings to be held in private in exceptional circumstances.
Similarly under Turkish law publicity is not regulated as an absolute procedural principle, and the Constitution accepts that hearings may be closed to the public on grounds of public security or public morality. In civil procedure, however, the legislature introduced a broader exception that went beyond these two grounds, but the Constitutional Court annulled this rule as unconstitutional. The aim of this seminar is to analyze the tension between the protection of personal data in judicial proceedings and the right to a public hearing and find a balance between those two conflicting fundamental rights.
BIO
Orhan Emre Konuralp received his undergraduate degree from Ankara University in 2011, his LL.M. degree in law and economics from Bilkent University in 2013. He got his Ph.D. degree in private law from Bilkent University in 2018. He carried out research for his doctoral dissertation, titled “Civil Liability of Arbitrators,” at Justus Liebig University in Giessen, Germany, supported by a TÜBİTAK scholarship. After completion of Ph.D degree he was entitled a post-doc scholarship which was provided by Bilkent University in which he used to work as research assistant during his LL.M. and Ph.D studies. He conducted his post-doc research at the University of Regensburg-Germany and at the Institut suisse de droit comparé, Lausanne-Switzerland.
In 2025, he participated in a TÜBİTAK-funded scientific project on workers’ experiences in mediation as a researcher. While his primary areas of expertise are civil procedure and enforcement-insolvency law, he has also conducted interdisciplinary research in fields such as consumer law and protection of personal data. He has presented papers at numerous prestigious international conferences, and some of these papers have subsequently been published as articles in indexed books. Currently he is a faculty member of the Kirklareli University Faculty of Law as an assistant professor since 2022.
All interested parties are invited.
The language of the event is English.