INSIGHTS
An account of how foreign-obtained encrypted-platform data enters Turkish criminal and extradition files, and how validity, integrity, attribution, transfer records and judicial reasoning are contested.
How material from EncroChat, Sky ECC and ANOM reaches a Turkish criminal file, the rule relied on for validity, the counter-argument, and the evidential issues raised against it.
Law stated as at 1 August 2026. There is no official English translation of the Turkish provisions discussed; translations are the author’s own and the Turkish text governs.
Counsel running an encrypted-platform case involving Türkiye (Turkey) in the Netherlands, Belgium, France or the United Kingdom will know the arguments in their own jurisdiction well. The question that has no ready English-language answer is what happens when the same material appears in a Turkish file — because a defendant is here, because a Turkish investigation was opened on the strength of it, or because a Turkish court is being asked to act on it.
The short answer is that the material is being admitted. The longer answer is that the position is not settled and the exclusionary counter-argument is seriously advanced, but the challenges described below — including demands for raw data, hashes and a complete transfer record — have not produced relief in the author’s case experience.
The three are routinely discussed together and they are not the same, which matters to the legal argument.
EncroChat and Sky ECC were commercial encrypted communication services. Law enforcement obtained access to the content — by implant or by interception — under authorisations granted in the states conducting the operations, and the resulting material was distributed to other countries.
ANOM was different in kind. The platform itself was run by law enforcement. Users were not intercepted in the ordinary sense; they were using a service that was collecting their messages by design.
The distinction affects what is being challenged. Against EncroChat and Sky ECC material, the argument is about the lawfulness and the reviewability of an interception. Against ANOM material, that argument has less purchase, and the questions shift towards attribution, entrapment-adjacent issues in systems that recognise them, and the reliability of the collection.
Turkish authorities did not conduct any of these operations. In every case the material arrives here as evidence gathered by a foreign state.
The material may reach a Turkish file by two legally distinct routes: a foreign state carries out a step requested by a Turkish judicial authority under Law No. 6706 and an applicable treaty, or the foreign state transmits material on its own initiative. The distinction matters because the same domestic provision does not govern both routes in the same way.
For the first route, Article 7(1)(ç) of Law No. 6706 does most of the work. It provides that steps requested by a Turkish judicial authority and carried out by the foreign state in accordance with its own law are treated as valid for Turkish purposes.
That is the direct statutory foundation for validity where the foreign operation supplied the product of a Turkish request. The further proposition — that the Turkish court is therefore not asked to decide whether the interception would have been lawful had it been carried out here — is not language found in the statute. It is the interpretation on which the material is presently being received: the first question becomes whether the requested foreign step complied with the law of the state that performed it.
Article 7(1)(ç) does not directly govern the second route. Where material was transmitted on the foreign state’s own initiative, the applicable treaty, the conditions attached by the sending state and the Turkish rules on receipt and evaluation of evidence have to be identified separately. The fact that a foreign state lawfully possessed the material cannot simply be converted into an Article 7(1)(ç) conclusion where Türkiye requested no step.
A second provision from the same Law is less often noticed and is discussed at section 7 below: information and documents received within judicial cooperation are subject to a purpose-of-use restriction. The mechanics of both are set out in Preparing a Mutual Legal Assistance Request to Türkiye.
The counter-argument is not weak and should be stated at its strongest, because it is being run and it has not been rejected in terms.
Turkish law contains a constitutional exclusionary rule. Findings obtained unlawfully cannot be accepted as evidence, and the Code of Criminal Procedure carries that principle into the trial provisions. Those rules are mandatory. They are not conditioned on where the evidence came from.
From that the argument runs as follows. That a foreign state acted in accordance with its own law establishes the validity of the foreign act. It does not establish that the resulting material was obtained lawfully for the purposes of Turkish law, and it cannot, because the Turkish rule is not a rule about foreign procedure. Treating the cooperation provision as an answer to the exclusionary rule collapses two different questions into one and gives the cooperation provision a reach the exclusionary rule does not permit.
The asymmetry that gives this argument its force is concrete. To obtain the content of communications from a phone in Türkiye, a judicial decision is required under the Code of Criminal Procedure, on defined conditions and for a defined period. The platform material was obtained by an operation abroad, in bulk, affecting very large numbers of users, without any Turkish judicial decision and without the conditions that would have applied here. The defendant’s position is that identical content, obtained here, would have required a decision that was never sought.
Counsel arriving from a jurisdiction where the fight has been about lawfulness of interception tend to reproduce that fight here. A separate set of objections concerns whether the material can be tested at all. Those objections are analytically distinct and should be preserved on the record, but they should not be advertised as successful: in the author’s case experience, demands based on raw data, hashes, the transfer chain and attribution have not produced relief in Turkish proceedings.
In practice, those objections ordinarily take four forms.
The raw data. What is placed in the Turkish file is frequently a processed extract — messages attributed to a handle, arranged and translated — rather than the underlying dataset. Where the raw data has not been provided, the defence cannot verify what was selected, what was omitted, or how the extract was produced.
Integrity verification. Hash values and equivalent records exist precisely so that a recipient can confirm that data has not changed between collection and production. Where they are absent from the file, the assertion that the material is unaltered is an assertion rather than something the defence can check.
The chain from the foreign authority to the Turkish file. Between the operation abroad and the extract in the Turkish file there is a sequence of transfers, selections and translations, each carried out by a different body. The record of that sequence is part of the case and can be requested.
Attribution. This is the point that survives every other answer. A handle is not a person. A device is not its registered owner. The inference from an account to a defendant is a separate evidential step and is frequently the weakest one in the file, particularly where it rests on a nickname, a contact entry in someone else’s device, or a pattern of activity.
These arguments do not require the court to hold that a foreign state acted unlawfully. They ask what the material in the Turkish file proves, whether its integrity can be checked and how it is connected to this defendant. Their doctrinal independence does not change the present practice observation that Turkish courts have not granted relief on this line in the files known to the author.
This is an evidential inference, not a claim derived from a particular case result. The messages are frequently in a language other than Turkish, and what reaches the file may be a translation of a selection. Where the defence has not seen the original text, two distinct problems are combined: whether the selection is representative, and whether the rendering is accurate. Slang, abbreviation and coded reference in short messages are exactly where translation is least reliable and where a rendered meaning can carry an inference the original does not support.
Article 6 of Law No. 6706 provides that information and documents received within judicial cooperation may not be used outside the investigation, prosecution or enforcement for which they were supplied unless the sending state consents. The rule applies directly to material received in response to a formal Turkish request. Its wording — material received “within judicial cooperation” — also supports applying the same baseline to a transmission made on a foreign state’s initiative, but that application is an interpretation rather than an express spontaneous-transmission rule. The applicable treaty and any conditions imposed by the sending state must also be checked.
Defined statutory exceptions apply where the legal characterisation changes, new suspects or defendants are brought into the investigation or prosecution after the cooperation step, or the material is needed in civil proceedings connected with the same offence. Use in an unrelated investigation, prosecution or enforcement process requires the sending state’s consent unless one of those exceptions genuinely covers the later use.
Platform material is by its nature a large dataset gathered in one operation and then drawn on repeatedly. Where a Turkish file was opened on material transmitted for a different matter, the route by which the material arrived, the original stated purpose and the scope of any consent have to be separated before the later use can be assessed.
Turkish courts are, at this stage, receiving this material and treating it as capable of supporting a conviction.
The reference point is a decision of the Eighth Criminal Chamber of the Court of Cassation of 15 October 2024 (E. 2024/18054, K. 2024/7673). Appellate courts have taken from it that data from an encrypted platform has evidential value where three conditions are met: the data was obtained within investigations conducted under decisions of a foreign court; it was transferred to the Turkish authorities in accordance with international mutual assistance procedures; and data integrity was preserved in the course of that transfer.
Those three conditions are the operative test, and each of them is a question of fact capable of being put in issue.
Now the qualification, and it is a real one rather than a hedge.
An appellate court applying that decision has described its effect as something understood implicitly from the Court of Cassation’s ruling rather than as an express holding. That characterisation comes from the court applying it, not from the defence. A position that is being derived by implication from a single chamber decision is not a settled rule, and it should not be advised on as though it were.
The exclusionary argument set out above continues to be advanced, including in academic writing, and it has not been foreclosed. This is an area in which the position may develop.
The clearest picture of how the Court of Cassation decision is being used at appellate level comes from a decision that is not reported and will not be found by searching the published databases:
Istanbul Regional Court of Appeal, Fourth Criminal Chamber
E. 2026/1372, K. 2026/1344, decision of 18 May 2026
It is set out here because it is difficult to obtain and because it establishes three things that a summary of the Court of Cassation decision alone does not.
First, the operative test. The Chamber recites the conditions in terms: data from the platform obtained within investigation processes conducted under decisions of foreign courts; transferred to the Turkish authorities in accordance with international mutual assistance procedures; data integrity preserved in the course of transfer. On those conditions being satisfied, the material has evidential value.
Second, and this is the part worth having, the Chamber describes that conclusion as one understood implicitly from the Court of Cassation’s ruling. Not as an express holding. That is the characterisation of the court applying it, in a decision, and it is a more accurate statement of the current position than anything a party could assert. A rule derived by implication from a single chamber decision is not a settled rule.
Third, the procedural posture is the opposite of what is usually assumed. The first-instance court had acquitted and lifted the measures. It was the prosecution that appealed. The Chamber quashed the acquittal — not because the material had been wrongly excluded, but because the judgment had been reached on incomplete investigation and on what it called a reason in form only.
That last point opens the second lever, and it operates whatever view is taken of admissibility.
A Turkish judgment must identify which evidence was relied on, which was rejected and why, and must show the connection between the evidence and the conclusion. A judgment that records a conclusion without performing that exercise does not satisfy what the Constitution and the Code of Criminal Procedure require, and it is quashed.
This cuts in both directions, which is why it is not a partisan argument. A conviction founded on platform material in which the court has not explained what in that material establishes what against this defendant is exposed on appeal. So is an acquittal reached without engaging with the material.
For a defendant the practical consequence is that there are two distinct routes. Persuading a court not to rely on the material is one. Establishing that the court cannot articulate what the material proves against this individual — as distinct from what it proves about a platform, a network, or a handle — is the other, and it engages an obligation the court owes regardless of its view on admissibility.
Encrypted-platform material does not only appear in Turkish prosecutions. It founds extradition requests made to Türkiye by the states that carried out the operations, where the person sought is here.
That route is live. In the author’s own case experience, requests founded on encrypted-platform material have been granted, taken through the Court of Cassation, become final and been executed. This is a practice observation grounded in files handled by the author, not a proposition derived from published case law.
For counsel abroad this matters more than the domestic admissibility question, and for a reason that is structural rather than evidential. An extradition court in Türkiye is required to carry out the procedural and admissibility review in Article 18 of Law No. 6706: it examines the statutory and treaty conditions, refusal grounds and adequacy of the request. It does not try guilt. An argument that evidence was unlawfully obtained in the requesting state is not ordinarily determined as a free-standing merits issue, although it may matter where it engages a statutory or treaty condition, a refusal ground or the adequacy of the request. That is the same position stated in Extradition from Türkiye: What Happens, in What Order, and Where It Can Stop.
The consequence is uncomfortable but should be faced squarely. A challenge to platform material that would be run before the trial court in the requesting state will not ordinarily be decided by the Turkish extradition court as though it were that trial. Where a client is in Türkiye and a European state holds material of this kind, the extradition question therefore has to be addressed on its own terms — the thresholds, the characterisation of the offence, the refusal grounds, the adequacy of the request and the executive stage — rather than solely on the evidential challenge that will be available later.
Three things are worth carrying across.
Outcomes do not transfer. A ruling excluding this material in one jurisdiction does not determine the Turkish position, and a Turkish court receiving it does not undermine an exclusion obtained elsewhere. The two proceedings apply different rules to the same dataset.
Positions do travel. An explanation of a message given in one forum is available in the other. Where a client faces proceedings in two states on the same material, the accounts should be consistent by design rather than by accident.
The Turkish file may contain material the foreign file does not. What was transmitted to Türkiye, in what form, and with what accompanying record, is itself disclosable material — and where the foreign proceedings have generated challenges to the same dataset, the results of those challenges are relevant here as evidence of what the dataset is.
In the author’s case experience this material has appeared predominantly, and to date effectively throughout, in organisation files. That is a practice observation, not a condition of admissibility. The way the allegation is structured in those files is discussed in Article 220 and the Structure of Multi-defendant Proceedings in Türkiye.
This article describes the framework and the state of the argument at the date given. It is an area in which the position is developing, and the description of current practice should be checked against the position at the time of reading rather than assumed to hold.
Nothing here addresses the law of any other jurisdiction, and the treatment of this material varies significantly between them. Whether a particular challenge is available depends on what the file contains, which is a question that can only be answered by reading it.
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.