INSIGHTS
A procedural guide for foreign counsel challenging INTERPOL data originating in Türkiye, covering the domestic file, CCF admissibility and timing, available grounds, and the limits of deletion.
Procedural defences and human-rights grounds, with a note for foreign counsel on what has to be obtained from the Turkish file before a deletion request can be properly assessed.
Law stated as at 1 August 2026. There is no official English translation of the Turkish Code of Criminal Procedure; translations below are the author’s own and the Turkish text governs.
A red notice of Turkish origin begins as a domestic judicial instrument that was never designed to travel. In the ordinary case it is an arrest warrant (yakalama emri) issued under Article 98 of the Turkish Code of Criminal Procedure (CMK No. 5271), on the application of a public prosecutor or of the court’s own motion, in proceedings at which the person concerned was not present and has never been heard. The National Central Bureau — within the General Directorate of Security, and therefore institutionally separate from the Ministry of Justice, which handles extradition traffic under Law No. 6706 — transmits a request for publication to INTERPOL’s General Secretariat in Lyon.
The General Secretariat’s function at that stage is defined, and limited. Under Article 86 of the Rules on the Processing of Data it conducts a legal review of all red notices before publication, to verify compliance with INTERPOL’s Constitution and Rules, in particular Articles 2 and 3 of the Constitution. Article 83 RPD supplies the substantive publication conditions. The review is documentary. The Secretariat does not investigate the underlying file, does not test the sufficiency of the evidence, and does not hear the person concerned.
The Commission for the Control of INTERPOL’s Files sits behind both. It is not an appellate body over the Secretariat and is not a court. It is an independent data-protection body governed by its own Statute, which entered into force on 11 March 2017 (Statute, Article 50) and was amended at the 93rd General Assembly session by Resolution GA-2025-93-RES-08, which revised Articles 3, 19, 23, 25, 28 and 33; and by Operating Rules adopted on 26 March 2026. Article 18 RPD confers on any person the right to apply directly to the Commission for access to, or correction and/or deletion of, data processed in the INTERPOL Information System, and Article 29 of the Statute restates that right. Decisions of the Requests Chamber are final and binding on the Organization and on the applicant (Statute, Article 38(1)). They are not binding on Türkiye, and they do not disturb the domestic warrant.
The practical consequence is that a challenge is a data-compliance argument, not a criminal appeal. Removal, where it is obtained, follows from a defect in the data or in the transmitting bureau’s compliance with the Organization’s own rules — not from a finding about guilt. The case succeeds or fails on what the Turkish file does and does not contain, and on whether the transmitted package satisfies rules that were written without any particular national procedure in mind.
Article 2(1) of the Constitution defines the Organization’s aims by reference to the laws existing in different countries and the spirit of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 3 forbids the Organization from any intervention or activity of a political, military, religious or racial character.
These are constitutional provisions, and the operative obligations that carry them into data processing are found elsewhere. Article 11 RPD (lawfulness) requires that processing be authorised with due regard to the law applicable to the transmitting bureau and respect the basic rights of the persons concerned, in accordance with Article 2 of the Constitution. Article 34 RPD requires the transmitting bureau, before any recording of data, to satisfy itself that the data comply with Articles 2 and 3 of the Constitution. Article 34(1) is worth reading closely: compliance with Article 2 is to be assessed by reference not only to applicable national law and international conventions but to the fundamental human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration to which that Article refers. Article 34(3) then lists the elements to be examined in the Article 3 assessment, and the list is broader than is usually pleaded: (a) the nature of the offence, namely the charges and underlying facts; (b) the status of the persons concerned; (c) the identity of the source of the data; (d) the position expressed by another National Central Bureau or another international entity; (e) obligations under international law; (f) implications for the neutrality of the Organization; and (g) the general context of the case. Article 34(4) supplies the basis on which the General Secretariat compiles its repositories of practice on Articles 2 and 3. Article 83 RPD sets the specific publication conditions for red notices. Article 86 RPD governs the Secretariat’s legal review.
The distinction between the instruments matters in drafting. Article 83 belongs to the Rules on the Processing of Data, not to the Constitution, and a submission that misplaces it invites the response that the applicant has not read the texts it relies on.
Two features of Turkish procedure are commonly misdescribed in submissions drafted abroad, and both misdescriptions weaken the case.
The first concerns trial in absence. As a rule, no hearing may be held in respect of a defendant who is not present (CMK 193(1)). For a defendant formally declared a fugitive under CMK 247, prosecution may proceed, but Article 247(3) provides that no conviction may be entered where the defendant has not previously been questioned. The rule holds in practice as well as on the page: questioning is a precondition of conviction, not a formality capable of being dispensed with. The position is therefore the opposite of what is frequently asserted in submissions drafted abroad. Turkish law does not permit the conviction of an absent defendant who has never been questioned.
The second concerns the nature of the order. The 2005 Code abolished detention in absence as a general institution, retaining a narrow exception in CMK 248(5) for fugitives located abroad, and replaced it with the arrest warrant of Article 98. Article 98(1) allows a magistrate to issue a warrant, on the prosecutor’s application, against a suspect who does not appear on summons or who cannot be summoned; Article 98(3) allows the trial court to issue one against a fugitive defendant of its own motion. Article 98(4) prescribes the contents: physical description, identity where known, the offence charged, and the place to which the person is to be sent on apprehension.
That list is the point. The warrant is not required to recite facts, to state the evidence, to assess the strength of suspicion, or to give reasons. It may therefore be formally valid under Turkish procedure without itself containing the factual narrative Article 83 RPD requires.
Law No. 6706 on International Judicial Cooperation in Criminal Matters (2016) governs the separate, judicial track. Article 22 permits Turkish judicial bodies to request extradition of a person abroad against whom an arrest or detention order exists, subject to thresholds of a one-year maximum sentence for prosecution cases and four months’ imposed imprisonment for conviction cases; Article 22(3) allows the Ministry of Justice to decline to transmit a request that does not meet the conditions, or where the burden is manifestly disproportionate. Articles 4 and 11 set out the grounds on which Türkiye itself refuses incoming cooperation and extradition, including political offences and substantial grounds for believing the person would face persecution or ill-treatment.
The argument to be made from all this is precise. It is not that Türkiye tries people in their absence. It is that the notice may rest on an ex parte order issued without the person having been heard, containing no judicial examination of the merits, while the police transmission channel is institutionally separate from the ministerial review applied to a formal extradition request under Article 22(3) of Law No. 6706. The precise relationship between those channels must be verified against the individual file.
Where a file has mixed characteristics, the Commission has approached Article 3 by asking which element predominates, examining the elements listed in Article 34(3) RPD. In financial and corporate cases the analysis is rarely a simple binary. The offence charged is ordinarily an ordinary-law offence — fraud, laundering, breach of trust — and the applicant’s case is that the prosecution’s function within the file is something else.
Material that has carried weight in mixed-motive files includes the chronology between a political event and the opening of the investigation; findings by international bodies on the same facts; and the treatment of similarly placed persons who are not politically exposed. INTERPOL’s policy on refugees (GA-2017-86-RES-09) is directly relevant where protection has been granted. What tends not to carry weight is assertion at the level of general country conditions, unattached to the file.
One category should be pleaded as rule rather than as practice. Where another member country has refused extradition, or has granted international protection, that is not merely material the Commission has been known to find persuasive: the position expressed by another National Central Bureau or international entity is an element the transmitting bureau was required to examine, under Article 34(3)(d) RPD, before the data were recorded at all. The argument is therefore not that the Commission should take the foreign decision into account, but that the source failed to perform an assessment the Rules obliged it to perform. Article 34(3)(c), on the identity of the source of the data, and Article 34(3)(f), on implications for the neutrality of the Organization, are available on the same footing and are rarely used.
Article 2 of the Constitution imports the Universal Declaration; Articles 11 and 34 RPD make compliance with Article 2 a condition of processing. That opens a route through which Convention case law is relevant without being directly binding on the Organization.
Where the allegation is misuse of criminal process, the relevant line is Article 18 ECHR. The Grand Chamber’s framework for plural purposes and the predominant purpose is set out in Merabishvili v. Georgia [GC], no. 72508/13, 28 November 2017. Its application to Turkey appears in Kavala v. Turkey, no. 28749/18, 10 December 2019 (violations of Article 5 §§ 1 and 4 and of Article 18 taken with Article 5 § 1), followed by Grand Chamber infringement proceedings under Article 46 § 4 on 11 July 2022; and in Selahattin Demirtaş v. Turkey (No. 2) [GC], no. 14305/17, 22 December 2020. Note the doctrinal distinction: the Article 18 predominant-purpose test and INTERPOL’s Article 3 predominance assessment are separate exercises applying different criteria, and conflating them is a recurring drafting weakness.
Where a conviction is relied on, the applicable line is different. Colozza v. Italy, no. 9024/80, 12 February 1985, and Sejdovic v. Italy [GC], no. 56581/00, 1 March 2006, address conviction in absence and the requirement of an effective opportunity to obtain a fresh determination. The argument is strongest where the Turkish file shows that the person was never questioned, because CMK 247(3) then places the conviction in tension with domestic law itself.
There is a further point here that is usually overlooked, and it is available on Türkiye’s own treaty commitments rather than on any contested characterisation. Türkiye is a party to the Second Additional Protocol to the European Convention on Extradition, incorporated domestically by Law No. 3732, under which a requested state may require an assurance that a person convicted in absence will be retried after surrender. The definition applied is broad: a judgment counts as given in absence even where defence counsel attended the final hearing and the defendant did not. Where Türkiye is the requesting state, this is a guarantee it gives — and the fact that the conviction falls within that definition is therefore something the Turkish authorities themselves are in a position to recognise. Where the file shows a conviction of that character, the applicant is not asking the Commission to make a finding about Turkish justice; the applicant is pointing to a characterisation Türkiye applies to its own judgments. Whether a guarantee was sought or given in the particular matter is worth establishing at the document stage.
Four distinct arguments arise, and they should be pleaded separately rather than merged. They are generally more document-led than a contested political-characterisation case: each can be tested against the face of the data transmitted and the underlying Turkish record.
Seriousness. Article 83 requires a serious ordinary-law crime and excludes offences arising from behavioural or cultural norms, family or private matters, and violations of administrative rules or private disputes, unless the conduct facilitates a serious crime or is connected to organised crime. The Secretariat maintains a non-exhaustive list of excluded offences.
Penalty threshold. For prosecution cases the offence must carry a maximum of at least two years’ deprivation of liberty; for conviction cases, at least six months imposed or remaining. Where the transmitted characterisation differs from the characterisation in the domestic warrant, the maximum stated to Lyon may not be the maximum the domestic file supports.
Judicial data. Article 83 requires a succinct and clear summary of the criminal conduct including time and place, the charges, the applicable legal provisions, the maximum penalty or the sentence, and reference to a valid arrest warrant or equivalent judicial decision. The requirement is conjunctive. A summary that restates the statutory definition of the offence rather than describing conduct does not satisfy it.
Validity of the underlying warrant. Where the warrant has been lifted, the file severed, or the person’s status changed, Articles 46 and 49 to 51 RPD impose obligations of updating and deletion on the source. Non-performance of those obligations is itself a compliance issue.
A red notice is published by the Organization after the Article 86 review. A diffusion is sent by a bureau directly to other bureaux and simultaneously recorded in a police database (Article 1(14) RPD; Articles 97 to 99 RPD). The circulation route is therefore different from the publication route in Article 86. It does not follow, however, that a wanted-person diffusion escapes pre-circulation compliance review: INTERPOL states that its Notices and Diffusions Task Force checks incoming wanted-person diffusions for compliance before they become visible to other member countries.
For a client stopped at a border the consequence is concrete. The alert that produced the stop may not be a red notice at all, and a client who has confirmed that no red notice appears on the public website has confirmed very little, since most red notices are not publicly listed and diffusions never are. The first CCF step is therefore ordinarily a request for access, which covers all data processed in the System, rather than an assumption about which instrument is in play. Where a diffusion is in issue, the difference between direct circulation and publication as a notice should be identified without assuming that no compliance review occurred.
Sequence matters, because each step gates the next. The order below reflects that dependency.
1. Authority to act in the two forums. A representative applying to the CCF must use the Commission’s own authorisation requirements and form. Access to and procedural action in the Turkish file are a separate question. Although defence counsel may act without a formal power of attorney where the person is present and gives authority directly, a person already sought through INTERPOL will ordinarily be in fugitive posture and a criminal-matter vekaletname will be required for the Turkish steps. Where it is executed abroad, it should be notarised and apostilled, or executed before a Turkish consulate. Before starting that route, check whether instructing foreign counsel already holds an instrument containing a right of substitution (tevkil yetkisi) under which Turkish counsel can be appointed.
2. File access and the case-progress record. The UYAP safahat printout for each investigation and prosecution file number. This establishes what exists before anything is ordered in certified form.
3. The arrest warrant (yakalama emri, CMK 98), as a certified copy from the issuing court or prosecution office, showing the issuing body, date, file number and the offence provisions cited.
4. Any detention order under CMK 100–101, and any order under CMK 248(5).
5. The fugitive declaration under CMK 247(2), if one exists, together with the decision recording the grounds.
6. Service records under the Notification Law No. 7201, including any service at an address of record or by publication. These are the pivot for the argument that the person was never effectively summoned.
7. The indictment and the decision accepting it (CMK 175), where the case has reached that stage.
8. Entry and exit records and passport records, to establish the date and manner of departure relative to the first summons.
9. Criminal record extract (adli sicil kaydı), to establish the absence of any conviction.
10. Confirmation from the Ministry of Justice whether an extradition request under Article 22 of Law No. 6706 was ever transmitted, or was declined under Article 22(3).
11. Correspondence with the National Central Bureau as to what was transmitted, sought under the Right to Information Law No. 4982. Refusal is likely; the refusal letter is itself of evidential value.
12. Any retrial guarantee sought from, or given by, the Turkish authorities in connection with a conviction given in the person’s absence, under the Second Additional Protocol to the European Convention on Extradition.
13. Any application for a safe-conduct document (güvence belgesi, CMK 246) and the decision on it. The instrument was designed for exactly this situation — a defendant who is abroad and has been declared a fugitive — and in principle it allows the person to attend and be questioned without being detained. In practice it is granted rarely. It is worth applying for, and the application and any refusal belong on the file, but no strategy should be built on the assumption that it will be granted.
Türkiye is a party to the Hague Apostille Convention of 1961, and the competent office depends on the character of the document. For judicial documents the apostille is issued by the president of the judicial commission attached to the court of first instance in the relevant judicial district; for administrative documents, by the provincial or district governor’s office. Sending a document to the wrong competent office can delay the certification sequence.
The working sequence is: obtain the certified copy; apostille the Turkish original; have the document translated by a sworn translator; have the translation notarised; and, where the receiving body requires it, apostille the notarised translation. Reversing the first two steps produces an apostille attached to a translation rather than to the instrument, which some receiving bodies will not accept.
Two features of Turkish practice are worth knowing. Documents generated through UYAP carry a barcode and an electronic signature statement under Law No. 5070, and can be verified independently through the system — often stronger evidence than a stamped photocopy, but not always acceptable to an apostille office, which may require a wet-signed and sealed copy. Obtain both. Second, calibrate the effort to the forum. The Commission requires only that submissions and attachments be in Arabic, English, French or Spanish (Operating Rules, Rule 30(3)); it does not require apostille. National extradition proceedings frequently do. Over-engineering documents for the Commission wastes weeks; under-engineering them for a national court loses the point at which it matters.
The following are patterns, and should be treated as hypotheses to be tested against the particular file rather than as findings.
Structural issues arise from the different functions of the instruments rather than necessarily from carelessness. An Article 98 warrant contains what Article 98(4) requires and, characteristically, nothing more: no facts, no time and place, no evidential assessment, no reasoning. Article 83 RPD requires particulars that the warrant itself was not designed to supply. The notice package must therefore obtain its factual summary from material beyond the face of the warrant.
A Turkish judicial authority may itself initiate the request for INTERPOL circulation, while the National Central Bureau carries out the transmission. It should not be assumed that every factual summary was written at the police stage or that every package is thin. What matters in the individual case is who initiated the request, which parts of the judicial file were used to assemble the transmitted summary, and whether the summary supplies the conduct, time and place required by Article 83.
A related structural risk follows from the separation between the live judicial file and the transmission channel: later developments in the court or prosecution file may not yet be reflected in the INTERPOL data. Whether and how the bureau was notified must be established from the individual record rather than assumed in either direction.
A third recurs in prosecutions built on organisational offences, where the transmitted summary attributes conduct at the level of the alleged structure rather than the individual, because the indictment from which it derives is organised the same way. Where the summary contains no act attributed to the person by time and place, the Article 83 argument is available on the face of the document.
File-specific defects are the ones worth verifying individually: divergence between the offence provisions in the warrant and those transmitted; a stated maximum penalty that the cited provisions do not support, which engages the two-year threshold; a status recorded as convicted where the file shows no questioning, which is inconsistent with CMK 247(3) and with Article 44(1) RPD; identity-particulars errors; a warrant that was never withdrawn after the underlying order was lifted; and files whose origin is a private complaint rather than an investigation opened of the prosecutor’s own motion, which engages the private-dispute exclusion.
1. On the first indication — border stop, visa refusal, de-risking by a bank, or a correspondent-bank query — record what was said and by whom, and obtain any written notification. Do not assume the alert is a red notice.
2. Instruct Turkish counsel immediately and begin the document sequence at 4.1. Document collection, not drafting, sets the timetable.
3. File a request for access with the Commission through its portal (Operating Rules, Rule 25(1)). This is a distinct request from one for correction or deletion, and it establishes what data exist before arguments are committed to writing.
4. Verify admissibility against Rule 30 before submitting: submission through the portal; signature by the person or a duly authorised representative; a working language; an unredacted identity document; a power of attorney; the purpose stated; reasons and a description of arguments for correction or deletion; and a maximum of 10 pages of argument accompanied by an indexed list of documents. The portal’s own submission guide sets further limits on appendices; check it before assembling the bundle rather than after.
5. Anticipate the timetable, and read it from the Statute rather than from practitioner summaries. The Requests Chamber is to rule on admissibility at the earliest opportunity and no later than one month from receipt (Article 32(1)). Once a request is admissible, the General Secretariat has forty-five days to confirm whether data concerning the applicant are being processed (Article 33(2)). Time then runs from the date of admissibility — four months for access, nine months for correction or deletion (Article 40(1) and (2)). Those periods do not restart on any later event. Where the General Secretariat is separately examining the compliance of the same data, the Requests Chamber must wait for that decision, but the delay operates as a ground for extending the time limit under Article 40(3), not as a new starting point (Article 33(5)). At the back end, the written decision goes to the General Secretariat within one month, the Secretariat implements within one month of receipt, and the applicant is notified within one month of adoption for access requests, or within one month of notification of implementation for correction and deletion (Article 41). Extensions are permitted where reasonable, and must be explained in the decision.
6. Take the abuse provisions seriously. Following the 2025 amendments, the Requests Chamber has express power to dismiss a request, an application for revision or a written submission where it finds serious abuse of its proceedings, and to report substantiated suspicions of serious abuse or misconduct to the General Secretariat, which may refer the matter onward including to law enforcement (Article 28(3)). Overstated factual assertions in a submission are no longer only a credibility problem.
7. Run the Turkish steps in parallel — and note that the Statute rewards it. Challenge the warrant domestically; apply for a safe-conduct document so that the person can be questioned without detention, which if granted removes the factual premise of the notice — bearing in mind that such applications are seldom granted, and that the value of making one lies as much in the record it creates as in the relief it may produce; and pursue individual application to the Constitutional Court where the domestic route is exhausted. This is not merely tactical. In determining what remedy to grant, the Requests Chamber is directed to take into account the steps that have been taken, or that should reasonably have been taken, by the applicant before the competent authorities of the source of the data (Article 39(4)(c)). An applicant who has done nothing in Türkiye (Turkey) is weaker in Lyon for that reason alone.
8. Where extradition is live, keep the two proceedings separate in substance but consistent in the record. Nothing filed in Lyon should contradict what is said before the national court.
9. Treat the decision as final. Decisions of the Requests Chamber are final and binding on the Organization and on the applicant (Article 38(1)); there is no appeal. The only route is an application for revision under Article 42, admissible where the discovery of a fact could have led the Requests Chamber to a different conclusion had it been known when the request was processed, and made within six months after the discovery of that fact.
This route reaches the Organization’s data and nothing else. Removal does not invalidate the Turkish warrant, does not terminate the proceedings, and does not prevent a bilateral extradition request transmitted through the Ministry of Justice under Law No. 6706 or through applicable treaty channels. The separate process is explained in Extradition from Türkiye: What Happens, in What Order, and Where It Can Stop. Removal does not prevent police cooperation conducted outside INTERPOL channels.
Nor does it reliably reach data that have already left the System. Where a member country has downloaded or copied data into a national system under Articles 56 and 62 RPD, national deletion depends on that country’s own law and practice, and border and visa consequences may persist after deletion in Lyon.
The Commission does not investigate, weigh evidence, or determine the merits of the criminal case. It will not find that the client is innocent, and submissions that invite it to do so misdirect the argument. What the applicant will receive may be limited in its reasoning where the source has restricted disclosure of its data.
Finally, deletion is not a bar. Nothing prevents a fresh request from the same bureau on a file that has been corrected to meet the conditions in Article 83. Where the underlying prosecution remains live, the result of a successful challenge is often not permanent removal but a return to the domestic forum on better terms — which is, in most files, the practical object of the exercise.
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.