INSIGHTS
An ordered account of how Türkiye handles a foreign state's extradition request, from Central Authority screening and provisional arrest to judicial review, appeal and the executive stage.
A procedural account of how a foreign state’s extradition request is dealt with in Türkiye (Turkey), for the person affected and for counsel instructed abroad.
Law stated as at 1 August 2026. There is no official English translation of Law No. 6706; translations are the author’s own and the Turkish text governs.
This article deals with one direction only: a foreign state asks Türkiye to surrender a person who is in Türkiye. That is the situation governed by Articles 10 to 21 of Law No. 6706 on International Judicial Cooperation in Criminal Matters. The Code of Criminal Procedure applies where the Law is silent, and the European Convention on Extradition, where applicable, takes precedence over both.
The reverse case — Türkiye requesting the surrender of a person abroad — is a different regime and is not covered here.
Two instruments are routinely confused with an extradition request, and the confusion costs time.
An INTERPOL red notice is not an extradition request. It is a record in an international organisation’s information system. It may precede a request, accompany one, or exist without one ever being made. Challenging the notice and resisting the request are separate exercises on separate timetables, discussed in Challenging INTERPOL Red Notices Originating from Türkiye.
Deportation is not extradition either. It is an immigration measure decided by a different authority under different legislation. Section 12 below explains why the two cannot simply be run in parallel.
An extradition request does not arrive at a court. It arrives at the Ministry of Justice, which acts as Central Authority.
The Central Authority examines the request, may call for further information and documents, and refuses requests that do not satisfy the requirements. Only requests that do satisfy them are sent onward, to the chief public prosecutor attached to the competent assize court.
This matters for anyone advising at an early stage. A request may fail without any court ever considering it, and the reasons will be administrative rather than judicial. Conversely, the fact that a matter has reached a court means the Central Authority has already been satisfied on the formal requirements.
The competent court is the assize court for the place where the person is located; where that is unknown, Ankara.
Extradition may be granted where the offence is punishable, under the law of both the requesting state and Turkish law, by a maximum of at least one year’s custodial sentence in a prosecution case. Where the request is based on a final conviction, the custodial sentence imposed must be at least four months.
Where the person is sought for several offences, those falling below the thresholds may nonetheless be included alongside those that meet them. That is a provision worth noticing: the counts that would not on their own support extradition can travel with the ones that do.
A person surrendered may be prosecuted, or have a sentence enforced, only for the offences on which the extradition decision was based. This is the rule of speciality, and it is stated in the Law rather than left to treaty.
Where more than one state seeks the same person, the Central Authority decides which request is dealt with first, taking into account the gravity of the offences and where they were committed, the order in which the requests arrived, the person’s nationality, and the possibility of onward extradition.
Where there is strong suspicion that an extraditable offence has been committed, a person may be provisionally arrested before the formal request arrives, on the request of the state concerned and with the approval of the Central Authority, under an applicable treaty or on the basis of reciprocity. There is a narrow category of offences for which provisional arrest is possible without any request from the state concerned at all.
A person arrested for extradition purposes must be brought before a criminal judge of peace within twenty-four hours. Before deciding, the judge is required to inform the person about the possibility of consent-based extradition and its legal consequences. That is a statutory step, not a courtesy, and it is the point at which an uninformed decision can be made — which is why the first hours matter. What to establish immediately is set out in Arrested or detained in Türkiye.
Where extradition proceeds on the basis of reciprocity rather than a treaty, provisional detention is capped at forty days. Where a treaty applies, the treaty period governs. If the extradition papers do not arrive within the applicable period, the provisional detention or judicial control is lifted — which does not prevent protective measures being applied later, once the request has been received.
Detention is not the only option. Judicial control under Article 109 of the Code of Criminal Procedure may be ordered instead, in a form calculated to prevent flight.
The forty-day cap drives the shape of the whole procedure. Because the papers must arrive before it expires, the prosecution files the extradition request document with the assize court as soon as it has it, and the case opens at speed. Anything the defence wants from the requesting state has to be asked for at that point; asking later is usually too late in a practical sense, whatever the position on paper.
Once proceedings are on foot, three limits apply and all three are commonly misread:
The assize court reviews detention at intervals of no more than thirty days until surrender. In practice the review is conducted on the papers rather than at a hearing, although questioning before a criminal judge of peace is available as a route.
If no extradition decision is taken within one year of the court’s admissibility ruling becoming final, the protective measures are lifted. The point to notice is where that year starts. It does not run from arrest; it runs from finality, which means after the Court of Cassation has dealt with the case. Time spent before that is governed by the thirty-day reviews and by the ceiling below, not by the one-year rule.
Total detention cannot exceed the period of the sentence the person could receive, or has received, for the offence for which extradition is sought. This is the only absolute ceiling the Law itself sets.
A question that counsel from other systems often raise at this point is whether the general detention limits in the Code of Criminal Procedure — the ceilings that apply to ordinary criminal proceedings before the assize courts — also apply here. They do not. Law No. 6706 establishes its own regime for detention in extradition proceedings, and that regime governs. The Code applies where the Law is silent, and on this it is not silent.
Extradition is refused — not may be, is — in the following cases.
Nationality. The person is a Turkish citizen. The only exception concerns obligations arising from being a party to the International Criminal Court.
Risk on protected grounds. There are strong grounds for suspecting that the person will be subjected to investigation, prosecution or punishment on account of race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, or will face torture or ill-treatment.
The character of the offence. The offence is one of thought, a political offence or connected with a political offence; or is purely military; or was committed against the security of the Turkish State, or to the detriment of the Turkish State, a Turkish national, or a legal person established under Turkish law; or falls within Turkish jurisdiction; or is time-barred or amnestied.
Previous determination in Türkiye. The person has already been acquitted or convicted in Türkiye for the same act.
The penalty. The request concerns an offence carrying the death penalty or a penalty incompatible with human dignity. This bar can be lifted: where the requesting state gives sufficient assurance that the penalty will not be carried out, the request may be granted.
Where the European Convention on Extradition applies between the two states, it supplies grounds that Law No. 6706 does not, and one of them fills a real gap.
A prosecution pending in Türkiye. The Law bars extradition where the person has already been acquitted or convicted in Türkiye for the same act. It says nothing about a Turkish investigation or prosecution that is still running. The Convention does: the requested party may refuse extradition where it is itself proceeding against the person for the same offence. Where a Turkish file is open on the same conduct, that is the provision to cite, and citing the Law alone will not reach it.
Ne bis in idem. The Convention separately addresses the position where a final judgment has been given in the requested state for the same offence.
Speciality. The Convention states the rule in its own terms alongside the Law’s version, which matters where the two are not identical in scope.
A related point on nationality. The bar in the Law applies to Turkish nationals. An application for Turkish citizenship that is pending is not citizenship, and does not engage the bar. Where an application is in progress, the question that matters is whether it will conclude before the process does — which is a timing question rather than a legal one, and should be assessed rather than assumed.
One further condition does not come from the Law but from the treaty layer, and it is easily missed.
Türkiye is a party to the Second Additional Protocol to the European Convention on Extradition, incorporated into Turkish law by Law No. 3732. Where the requesting state’s judgment was given in the defendant’s absence, Türkiye may require an assurance that the person will be retried after surrender, with the rights of the defence that Turkish criminal procedure provides.
The definition of absence is the part to notice. Under the Protocol as applied in Türkiye, a judgment is treated as having been given in absence even where defence counsel attended the final hearing and the defendant did not. That is broader than the position in several requesting states, which treat representation by counsel as sufficient presence. A conviction the requesting state does not regard as in absentia may therefore be treated as such here, and the assurance becomes a condition of surrender rather than a courtesy.
This applies only where both states are parties to that Protocol. Where they are not, the point falls away and the position is governed by the Law and any bilateral instrument.
The Law does not leave the political-offence question at large. Where a request is said to concern a political offence, all the elements of the act are to be considered — in particular the manner of its commission, the means used, and the gravity of the consequences produced. On that assessment an act may be held not to be a political offence.
Two categories are excluded outright: genocide and crimes against humanity are never treated as political offences.
Alongside the mandatory bars, the Law contains a discretionary ground.
Where, by reason of the person’s individual circumstances — being under eighteen at the date of the request, having been present in Türkiye for a long time, or being married are the examples the Law gives — extradition would cause the person or their family harm disproportionate to the gravity of the act, the request may be refused.
This is a proportionality argument on personal and family circumstances, available on the face of the statute, and it does not depend on establishing any of the mandatory bars. It is regularly advanced. It is not regularly accepted.
The realistic position is that the ground succeeds where there is a settled family life in Türkiye that surrender would break — a spouse, children, dependency, years of established residence — and does not succeed where the argument rests on inconvenience, business interests or length of stay alone. Counsel weighing whether to run it should assess the family evidence first and the legal formulation second, because the formulation is not where these applications fail.
A person may consent to extradition, in which case the ordinary procedure is not applied and surrender may follow on a simplified basis.
The court is required to explain the nature and legal consequences of consent-based extradition, together with the person’s rights under the Code of Criminal Procedure, before asking whether they accept it. Even where consent is given, the court still decides whether the request is admissible under the Law and any applicable treaty, that decision is subject to challenge, and execution remains subject to the approval of the Central Authority.
Consent shortens the process. It does not remove the bars, and it forecloses the arguments described in sections 6 to 8. It should not be given before the file, the thresholds and the personal circumstances have been assessed.
Where consent is not given, the assize court examines whether the conditions for extradition are met under the Law and any applicable treaty, and decides whether the request is admissible. If the documents supplied are inadequate, the court may set a period for further information and documents to be produced.
That power exists, but expectations should be calibrated. In the author’s case experience, applications for further material are commonly refused and the assessment is made on the extradition request document as it stands. That is a practice observation, not a limit in the statute: Article 18(2) expressly empowers the court to seek additional information and documents. A defence that depends on obtaining something further from the requesting state is therefore a fragile one, and the application should be made at the outset rather than held back.
What the court is deciding, and what it is not. The assize court is required to carry out the procedural and admissibility assessment in Article 18: it must examine the conditions in the Law and any applicable treaty, including the thresholds, bars and adequacy of the request. It is therefore not accurate to say that the court conducts no examination. What it does not do is try guilt or reproduce the trial that may follow in the requesting state. An allegation that evidence was unlawfully obtained there, or that the foreign investigation was defective, is not ordinarily determined as a free-standing merits issue in the extradition proceeding. It may matter only to the extent that it engages a statutory or treaty condition, a refusal ground, or the adequacy of the material on which the request is made.
The distinction between adequacy and merits is important. Whether the requesting state’s material describes conduct attributable to the person — rather than merely reciting the offence and its statutory elements — can properly be raised as a question about the sufficiency of the request. Particulars of place, time and alleged act may expose that issue in an individual file. The Law does not, however, state a general test requiring the court in every case to identify where, when, how and on what evidence the conduct occurred, and the available file does not establish that formulation as settled case law. It should therefore be used as a file-specific adequacy argument, not presented as a universal extradition standard or equated with Article 83 RPD.
Two features of these proceedings surprise counsel from other systems.
There is no intervention. A party cannot join the extradition proceedings as an intervener.
There is no intermediate appeal. Turkish criminal decisions ordinarily go first to the regional courts of appeal. Extradition decisions do not: the route is directly to the Court of Cassation, which is required to conclude the appeal within three months. Once the decision becomes final, the file goes to the Central Authority.
There is a step between the appeal and the Chamber’s decision that does not appear in Law No. 6706 and that counsel from other systems do not expect.
The Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office at the Court of Cassation prepares a written opinion — a tebliğname — setting out its view on whether the decision below should be upheld or quashed. The defence may file a written response to it.
Two things follow. The response is the last written opportunity to address the Chamber, and it is the only opportunity to address the reasoning the prosecutor’s office has actually adopted rather than the reasoning anticipated when the appeal was drafted. And because the opinion is prepared on the papers, it can contain errors of fact about the person or the file. Where it does, the response is where they are corrected; there is no other mechanism, and an uncorrected error goes to the Chamber as part of the material before it.
A request for release can be made at this stage as well, and is addressed to the Chamber.
This is the single most important structural point in the whole procedure, and it is the one most often missed by counsel advising from abroad.
A ruling by the assize court that extradition is admissible does not mean the person will be surrendered. Execution of that ruling requires the proposal of the Minister of Justice and the approval of the President, after the opinions of the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and of the Interior have been taken.
There are therefore two decisions, not one, and they are made by different branches on different criteria. A judicial finding of admissibility leaves the outcome open. The Central Authority notifies both the requesting state and the person concerned whether the request has been granted or refused.
The executive stage also takes time, and the time is not trivial. Once the decision has become final at the Court of Cassation, the period before the executive decision issues varies with the significance of the file and in the ordinary case runs to something in the order of six months. That is not a statutory period and should not be treated as one, but it is the interval a client and their counsel abroad should plan around — alongside the one-year rule in section 5, which is running during the same period.
A foreign national who is in an extradition process cannot be deported without the opinion of the Central Authority. And a foreign national cannot be deported to a state whose extradition request has been refused.
The second limb is the one that matters most in practice. It closes the route by which a refused extradition might otherwise be achieved through immigration procedure. Where criminal and immigration tracks are running at the same time — which, for a foreign national in Türkiye, is the normal situation rather than the exception — this provision is frequently the operative rule in the file.
Where extradition is granted, surrender is arranged in cooperation with the relevant ministries.
If the requesting state does not collect the person on the agreed date without good reason, the protective measures are lifted thirty days after that date.
Surrender may be postponed by the Central Authority where the person faces investigation, prosecution or an outstanding custodial sentence in Türkiye, or is not fit to travel. The decision is notified to the person and to the requesting state.
Property may travel with the person: items useful as evidence, or obtained through the offence, found on the person at arrest or later, may be handed over — and may be handed over even where no extradition decision can be taken because the person has died or absconded. Surrender of property may be postponed where it is required for a Turkish investigation or prosecution. Property belonging to bona fide third parties is not handed over.
Costs of executing a request are borne by the executing state unless the central authorities agree otherwise.
Reading the procedure end to end, the points at which an extradition matter is decided in Türkiye are these, in rough order of how often they matter:
The dual-criminality and threshold analysis, which is a question of comparing two legal systems rather than of asserting innocence
The characterisation of the offence, which determines whether the political-offence bar and the exclusion for offences within Turkish jurisdiction are engaged
Detention: the applicable cap, the thirty-day reviews, the one-year lapse and the sentence ceiling
The personal-circumstances proportionality ground, which is under-argued
The completeness of the requesting state’s documents, and the court’s power to require more
The deportation lock, where an immigration track is running
The executive stage, which is not a judicial argument at all and requires a different kind of submission
This article describes the framework in the Law. It does not describe how a particular request will be handled, and three qualifications should be kept in view.
Where a treaty applies, the treaty governs and may set different periods, different thresholds and different grounds. The framework above is the domestic default.
The executive stage is not subject to the same criteria as the judicial stage, and a strong judicial outcome does not determine it.
And nothing here addresses the position in the requesting state. Where a person is resisting extradition to Türkiye from another country, that is a matter for the law of that country, and it is outside the scope of this article.
This article describes general procedure and does not constitute legal advice on any particular matter.
A procedural account of how a foreign state’s extradition request is dealt with in Türkiye, for the person affected and for counsel instructed abroad.
This publication is general information and does not constitute legal advice for a specific matter.