INSIGHTS
An explanation of how Article 220 structures multi-defendant organisation cases in Türkiye, including the existence threshold, role-based liability, aiding, effective remorse, evidence, detention and strategy.
How liability is allocated in an organisation case, where the thresholds actually sit, and why the individual count is rarely where the case is decided.
Law stated as at 1 August 2026. There is no official English translation of the Turkish Criminal Code; translations are the author’s own and the Turkish text governs.
In a large Turkish organised-crime proceeding the specific act alleged against a particular defendant is often the smallest part of the case against them. What carries weight is the structure the prosecution proposes: who is said to have founded or directed, who is said to have belonged, who is said to have helped, and how each act committed by anyone is attributed to the whole.
That is a consequence of how Article 220 of the Turkish Criminal Code is built. A defence organised only around the conduct alleged against the individual client leaves the structure unchallenged, and the structure is what determines exposure.
The provision was materially amended in both 2020 and 2025. Law No. 7571, published on 25 December 2025, raised the penalties again, fixed the armed-organisation increase at one half and added an enhancement where children are used as instruments in offences committed within the organisation’s activity. A separate limb on offending on behalf of an organisation is no longer in force following constitutional review. Earlier English-language summaries are therefore unreliable both on the figures and on the available categories.
This is the first question and it is more demanding than it is usually treated as being.
Article 220 requires that the organisation be suitable to commit the intended offences, assessed by reference to its structure, its number of members, and the instruments and means at its disposal. And it sets a hard floor: an organisation cannot exist with fewer than three members.
Both statutory limbs are objective, and both are capable of being tested on the material in the file rather than by assertion. Continuity and hierarchy are not additional words in Article 220(1); they are concepts used in the case law to distinguish an organisation from a loose or ad hoc association of people who have committed offences together. Where the prosecution’s material shows a series of isolated dealings rather than a continuing structure capable of pursuing an offending programme, the organisation allegation is the point to contest.
Contesting it late is expensive. Once the structure is accepted as the organising premise of the file, every subsequent question is answered inside it.
Founding or directing an organisation for the purpose of committing offences carries five to ten years’ imprisonment.
Membership is a separate and lesser offence, carrying two to five years.
Where the organisation is armed, the sentence under either limb is increased by one half.
Offences actually committed in the organisation’s activity are punished separately, in addition to the organisation offence. The structure is cumulative rather than alternative, which is the arithmetic that produces the very long aggregate sentences characteristic of these files.
Those who direct an organisation are separately punished as principals for all offences committed within its activity.
The provision does not require proof that the director physically carried out each such offence. It does require the prosecution to establish both the person’s directing role and that the separate offence was committed within the organisation’s activity. Keeping those two links visible is more accurate than treating a director as automatically responsible for every offence attributed to any other defendant.
Two consequences follow, and both are procedural rather than substantive.
The prosecution’s central task is not to prove each act against each defendant. It is to establish the structure and to place each defendant within it. Evidence is therefore organised around relationships, communications and hierarchy rather than around discrete conduct, which is why files of this kind read as they do.
And a defendant’s exposure can be shaped by where they are placed in that structure long before any specific allegation is examined. The difference between “member” and “director” is therefore not merely one of degree: the directing classification activates the additional rule in Article 220(5), subject to proof that the relevant offences fall within the organisation’s activity.
Where the placement is wrong, that is the argument, and it is an argument about evidence of role: who instructed whom, who could decide, who could be overruled.
Since 25 December 2025, Article 220(5) contains a separate enhancement directed at those who manage the organisation. Where children are used as instruments in offences committed within its activity, the punishment imposed on the director under the preceding paragraphs is increased by between one half and one times.
This is an enhancement of the director’s organisation sentence. It does not replace the separate responsibility for offences committed within the organisation’s activity. Older material describing a current offence of acting on behalf of an organisation under Article 220(6) should not be used: that paragraph is no longer in force.
A person who is not part of the organisation’s hierarchical structure but who knowingly and willingly assists it is punished as a member, with a reduction of up to one third according to the nature of the assistance.
This is where a large proportion of defence work in these files actually happens, because it is the provision that reaches people at the edges: accountants, transporters, intermediaries, landlords, people who supplied a service.
The structure of the provision shows where the defence is built. There are two elements and they are separate. The assistance must be assistance to the organisation, and it must be given knowingly and willingly.
The second element is where most of the argument sits, and it reaches further than it first appears. What has to be established is not merely that the defendant intended the act that turned out to be helpful. The knowledge required extends to the existence of the organisation itself — that there was such a structure, and that what was being provided was being provided to it. A person who supplied a service to an individual, on ordinary terms, without knowing that the individual belonged to anything, has not satisfied the element merely because the service was in fact useful to an organisation that existed.
One possible evidential framework — not a statutory test or a confirmed rule of practice — is to compare the conduct with what is ordinary in the person’s trade or profession. A service supplied on ordinary commercial terms, at ordinary prices, documented in the ordinary way, and supplied equally to others, looks different from the same service supplied outside those patterns. The comparison is useful only insofar as the records bear on knowledge and willing assistance; commercial regularity is not a defence by itself.
The reduction, where it applies, is expressly tied to the nature of the assistance rather than to its value or to the defendant’s contrition, which is a distinction worth making in submissions.
Organisations formed to commit offences against the security of the State or the constitutional order fall under a separate and more serious provision, Article 314, which carries substantially heavier sentences.
For present purposes only one feature of that provision matters: Article 314(4) expressly applies the other provisions on the Article 220 offence to itself. The architecture described in this article — the threshold for an organisation to exist, director liability, the treatment of assistance, the effective-remorse regime — is therefore relevant there too, operating on a heavier tariff.
Everything specific to that category, including how conduct is characterised as falling within it, is outside the scope of this article.
Article 221 provides for effective remorse in organisation cases, on a scale.
Founders or directors who dissolve the organisation, or whose information brings about its dissolution, before an investigation has begun and before any offence has been committed in furtherance of its aim, are not sentenced.
A member who voluntarily notifies the authorities that they have left, without having participated in any offence committed in the organisation’s activity, is not sentenced.
A member apprehended without having participated in any such offence, who provides information suitable to bring about the dissolution of the organisation or the arrest of its members, is not sentenced.
Where the person did not surrender voluntarily but was caught, and gives that information afterwards, the sentence for founding, directing or membership is reduced by between one third and three quarters.
Those who benefit are subject to a period of supervised release.
Where a person gives information under this regime, the design has an evidential consequence for any defendant implicated by that account. The information most valuable to the cooperating person’s own position — information capable of dissolving the organisation or securing arrests — is precisely the information the statute rewards most. That is not a reason to disregard the account. It is a reason to test it in the way the statute’s own logic invites: what was said, at what point in that person’s own case, before or after apprehension, and whether any part of it is corroborated by material that does not come from a person in the same position.
Where several cooperating defendants have in fact given accounts, inconsistencies between them can be tested alongside timing, the benefit sought and independent corroboration. Not every organisation file contains a substantial body of cooperating-defendant evidence, and the article does not assume that one does.
Organisation files in Türkiye (Turkey) are assembled from a small number of recurring evidence streams:
Intercepted communications and technical surveillance, gathered over long periods and produced in summary form
Device and encrypted-platform material— messages, contact graphs, location data
Statements of cooperating defendants, where present
Financial and corporate records, frequently overlapping with a parallel laundering allegation
Link analysis prepared by investigators, in which relationships are presented as findings
Each stream carries its own admissibility questions and they are not interchangeable. The date and scope of the authorising decision, whether the material falls inside it, how it was acquired and how it was later summarised are separate points, and a challenge that treats them as one tends to fail on all of them.
The practical difficulty is volume. A file of tens of thousands of pages is not read the way a short file is read, and the parts that decide the case are rarely flagged as important.
Organisation allegations rarely travel alone. Where the offending is said to have produced assets, a laundering allegation and asset measures commonly run alongside, on their own timetable and before different decision-makers. The mechanics of those measures are set out in MASAK Measures in Türkiye: Suspension, Seizure and Review.
The point to hold onto is that positions taken in one proceeding are available in the other. An account of a commercial relationship given to explain a payment is an account of the same relationship for the purposes of the aiding provision.
There is a structural feature of these cases that does not appear in any of the provisions and that counsel advising from abroad should understand before advising anyone on what to expect.
The conditions for a conviction under Article 220 are demanding. The organisation has to exist on the statutory test, the defendant’s role has to be established, and where assistance is alleged the knowledge element has to be proved. Those are strict requirements and they operate as real constraints at the end of the process.
Detention is assessed on a different question, at a different time, on a much thinner record. And these files are large: many defendants, extensive material, a long investigation. In the author’s practice experience, the consequence is that the period between arrest and indictment commonly becomes a period in custody, and applications for release during it face a court that has not yet had to engage with the strict conditions described above. This is a practice observation about the timing of review, not a lower legal threshold for conviction.
The two things therefore come apart. The strength of the case on the elements is not what determines whether the client is in custody while it is examined, and a defence built entirely on the elements can be entirely sound and still leave the client where they are for a long time.
Three consequences follow for how a matter is run.
The detention argument is not a secondary workstream to be picked up if the merits stall. In terms of what the client actually experiences, it is frequently the primary one, and it is decided early.
Advice to a client or to instructing counsel abroad has to separate the two questions explicitly. An assessment that addresses only the likelihood of conviction answers a question the client is not yet living in.
And the work done on the elements at the outset is not wasted even where it does not produce release, because the same analysis is what the case turns on later. It simply should not be presented as though it were the answer to the custody question.
Testing whether an organisation exists at all: the three-member floor and the suitability requirement, on the material in the file
Testing the client’s placement within the alleged structure, and the evidence of role rather than of association
Where assistance is alleged, testing knowledge and willingness; ordinary professional or commercial records may be relevant evidence but are not a statutory defence
Challenges to the acquisition, scope and summarising of intercept and device material
Where cooperating-defendant accounts exist, analysis against the timeline, against each other, and against independent material
Detention and judicial control applications throughout, which in long files are a substantial part of the work
This article describes the provisions and how they interact. It does not describe how a particular file will be decided, and two qualifications matter.
The provisions were significantly amended in 2020 and again in 2025. Characterisations drawn from earlier commentary — including the former penalty figures and the former on-behalf limb — do not describe the current position.
And the application of these provisions is heavily fact-dependent. Whether a structure amounts to an organisation, whether a role amounts to direction, and whether assistance was knowing are questions decided on the material in the individual file.
This article describes general procedure and does not constitute legal advice on any particular matter.
This publication is general information and does not constitute legal advice for a specific matter.