INSIGHTS
What a Turkish court can order once the first days are over: the detention decision, the statutory ceilings, the review cycle, objection, judicial control, and the travel ban that outlives the case.
What a Turkish court can order once the first days are over, how long each measure may last, and why the restriction that matters most is often the one that survives release.
Law stated as at 22 September 2026. There is no official English translation of the Turkish provisions discussed; translations are the author's own and the Turkish text governs.
Most English-language material about Turkish criminal procedure stops at the point where our own page on being arrested or detained in Türkiye (Turkey) stops: the custody period, the right to counsel, notification of the family and of a consulate. That material describes hours.
What follows describes years. When custody ends, the person is either released by the prosecutor or brought before a judge of the criminal judgeship of peace, and it is that hearing — usually short, often the first time anyone has seen the file — that sets the shape of the next two or three years. Foreign nationals and the lawyers instructing from abroad consistently underestimate this hearing, because in many systems the equivalent step is a formality. Here it is not.
The question is usually framed as detention or release. In practice four things can come out of that hearing, and they have different consequences.
The person may be released with no measure attached. The person may be released subject to judicial control — a set of conditions with their own duration and their own removal procedure. The person may be detained. And, where the person is a foreign national, an immigration decision may be taken alongside any of these, on a separate track, by a different authority, on different criteria.
The fourth possibility is the one that surprises. A criminal court's decision to release does not bind the immigration authority, and an entry ban or removal decision can follow a release rather than a conviction.
That track is governed by separate legislation, decided by the provincial governorship, and challenged before different courts on different time limits; where an organisation is alleged, a removal decision follows from the allegation itself rather than from any conviction. It is a subject of its own and is treated separately. Two interactions belong here, though. A foreign national who is in an extradition process cannot be removed without the opinion of the Central Authority, and cannot be removed to a state whose extradition request has been refused — a sequencing rule discussed in our article on extradition from Türkiye. And where property or accounts have also been restrained, a third track is running on its own timetable, described in our article on MASAK measures and seizure.
Detention requires three things under Article 100 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (Law No. 5271), and the third is the one most often left out of English-language accounts.
There must be concrete evidence showing strong suspicion of the offence. There must be a ground for detention — concrete facts indicating flight or concealment, or conduct creating strong suspicion that evidence will be destroyed, concealed or altered, or that pressure will be applied to a witness, a victim or anyone else. And the measure must be proportionate: detention may not be ordered where it is disproportionate to the importance of the matter and to the sentence or security measure expected.
Proportionality is not a gloss. It is a separate statutory bar and it is the limb on which an argument can be made in a file where the first two are effectively conceded.
In practice the first element is rarely elaborated. Detention decisions are commonly written in standard form, and where the file happens to contain expert material — a forensic report, a MASAK report, a technical examination — the decision cites it as the concrete evidence and goes no further. The consequence for the defence is that the argument on strong suspicion has to be made against a document that does not engage with it. That is why the record built over the monthly reviews matters more, in these files, than the first hearing does.
The second element is where the practical difficulty lies. For a listed set of offences — the catalogue in Article 100(3) — the ground for detention may be deemed to exist. The list runs from genocide and crimes against humanity through migrant smuggling and human trafficking, intentional killing, torture, sexual offences, theft and robbery, drug manufacture and trafficking, offences against state security and the constitutional order, arms smuggling, banking embezzlement, smuggling and cultural-property offences, and several categories of intentional injury added since 2022.
Two features of the list are worth knowing and are almost never reported.
It is narrower than the reputation of the organisation provisions suggests. The catalogue includes Article 220 of the Criminal Code — but expressly excludes its second, seventh and eighth paragraphs. Membership of an organisation is the second paragraph. So an allegation of membership, standing alone, does not put the file in the catalogue, and a decision that treats it as though it did has skipped a step.
And money laundering is not in it. That mirrors a feature of the seizure provisions described in our article on MASAK measures, where the laundering offence is likewise absent from the catalogue and the power is borrowed from elsewhere. The same misreading recurs in both places.
Since 2021 the provision has also required the strong suspicion to be based on concrete evidence before the catalogue can be relied on, which is a tightening that a decision written to the old formula does not reflect.
None of this makes detention automatic, and saying so is the first argument in most files. The catalogue creates a presumption that may be relied on, not an obligation to detain, and the judge remains required to give reasons referable to the individual. But the working reality is that in catalogue cases the reasoning frequently reduces to the citation of the catalogue itself, and the defence's task becomes the construction of a record showing why this person, on these facts, does not present the risk the catalogue assumes.
The reasoning obligation is not general. It is a list of four items under Article 101, and each has to be shown by concrete facts: the strong suspicion, the existence of a ground for detention, the proportionality of the measure, and — since 2021 — that judicial control would be insufficient. The prosecutor's request itself has to set out the legal and factual reasons why judicial control would not do. The content of the decision is communicated orally and a written copy is given to the person.
The fourth item is the useful one. It means the decision must explain why the lesser measure was rejected, which is a question with a factual answer in most files — an address, employment, family, a surrendered travel document — and which a decision written to the pre-2021 formula does not address at all.
Defence counsel is mandatory at this stage; where the person has not instructed a lawyer, one is appointed. Decisions under these provisions are subject to objection.
The practical significance of the reasoning obligation is not in the first hearing. It is in everything that comes after. Objections, later release applications and any eventual application to the Constitutional Court all test whether the reasons given were individual and whether they continued to be given as the file developed. A formulaic first decision that is never improved upon becomes, over months, the strongest material the defence has.
What produces a result varies by file, and in some files nothing does. Where a development changes the factual position — a forensic medical report, an examination that removes the basis of the allegation — release can follow from it directly. Otherwise, release is a matter for the court rather than the prosecutor, and it is materially more likely once the matter has moved from investigation to trial. Counsel advising a family abroad should set expectations on that sequence rather than on the strength of the argument.
The ceilings, set by Article 102, differ by court, by stage, and by the category of the offence.
Before the indictment. Detention during the investigation may not exceed six months in matters outside the jurisdiction of the assize court, or one year in matters within it. For offences against the constitutional order and the related categories, for offences within the counter-terrorism legislation (Law No. 3713), and for offences committed collectively, the period is one year and six months, extendable by a further six months on stated grounds. That last category is wider than it looks: it does not require an organisation, only that the offence was committed by more than one person acting together.
Overall. Outside the jurisdiction of the assize court the maximum is one year, extendable by six months. Within it the maximum is two years, and the extensions may not exceed three years in total — five years in all. For the constitutional-order categories and the counter-terrorism legislation the extensions may not exceed five years, so seven in all.
For children, the periods apply at half for a person under fifteen at the time of the act, and at three-quarters for a person under eighteen.
One procedural point sits in the same provision. An extension decision is to be taken only after the views of the prosecutor, of the suspect or defendant, and of defence counsel have been obtained. On the face of it, each extension is an occasion on which the defence is entitled to be heard.
In practice detention is extended without that decision being taken in the form the provision requires. Counsel instructing from abroad should draw two conclusions from this rather than one. The entitlement cannot be relied on to generate a hearing, so a diary built around it will be wrong. And the absence of a properly constituted extension decision is itself a fact to establish and record, because the objection, the later release applications and any individual application to the Constitutional Court are all built from what the file does and does not contain.
This is the part that produces disbelief, and it has a mechanism rather than a scandal behind it.
Time counts toward the ceiling up to the first-instance judgment. Once the trial court convicts, the detention is no longer pre-trial detention: its basis becomes the judgment, and time spent while the case is before the appellate courts is not counted toward the statutory maximum. The reasoning, given by the General Assembly of Criminal Chambers of the Court of Cassation (E. 2011/1-51, K. 2011/42, 12 April 2011), is that the trial court has found the offence proved and the detention now rests on that finding — an approach it aligned with the European Court of Human Rights, which likewise excludes post-conviction time when assessing the reasonableness of detention under Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
The consequence is arithmetic. A defendant whose five-year ceiling is not reached by the date of the first-instance judgment cannot rely on it afterwards, however long the appeal takes — and in a serious file the appellate stage alone can run for years.
For counsel advising from abroad, this is the single most important thing to understand about the ceilings. The question is never "how long has this person been detained". It is how much of that time fell before the first-instance judgment.
The ceilings are maxima, not entitlements: detention must end as soon as its grounds do. Beyond that, two departures are encountered in practice, and neither appears in any account of the Turkish system written for foreign readers.
Detention occurs in matters in which the Code prohibits it. The prohibition is specific, and it is in Article 100(4): detention may not be ordered for offences carrying only a judicial fine, or for offences whose upper limit of imprisonment does not exceed two years — save for those committed intentionally against bodily inviolability. It is nevertheless encountered.
And the wrong ceiling is sometimes applied. An offence within the jurisdiction of the criminal court of first instance keeps its own ceiling — eighteen months — even where it is tried before an assize court, which happens routinely when charges are joined. The Court of Cassation has held repeatedly that the classification of the offence governs, and that being tried before an assize court does not convert it into an assize-court offence for this purpose. Some assize courts nevertheless apply the assize ceiling to such a defendant. It is not the general practice. But in a multi-defendant file the point is worth establishing separately for each defendant and early, because the difference between eighteen months and five years turns on it.
Neither point is the general rule; in most files the periods are kept. But a lawyer who advises a family on the ceiling alone will sometimes be wrong, and where a discrepancy appears it is a matter to raise in the file rather than to absorb.
During the investigation the review happens under Article 108, at intervals of no more than thirty days, on the prosecutor's request, before the criminal judgeship of peace, by reference to the conditions for detention — and the suspect or defence counsel is heard. The suspect may also ask for the review within that period rather than waiting for it. During the trial stage the court decides of its own motion at each hearing, between hearings where circumstances require, or within the same thirty-day period.
The distinction matters for anyone instructing from abroad. In the investigation the review is not automatic in the sense of happening without anyone doing anything: it is triggered by the prosecutor, and the right to be heard at it belongs to the defence and can be exercised.
The cycle is the central feature of the system and the one that foreign counsel find hardest to accept, because it produces a decision every month and those decisions are frequently identical. Understanding what the cycle is for changes how it is used: each review is an opportunity to put something new in front of the court, and a review at which nothing new is filed is a review the defence has spent.
A detention decision may be objected to within two weeks of the person learning of it (Article 268) — a period extended from seven days in March 2024, which matters when reading older accounts. The objection is filed with the authority that made the decision; that authority may correct its own decision, and if it does not, it must forward the objection within three days.
Where it goes is a 2021 change worth knowing. Objections against detention and judicial control decisions of a criminal judgeship of peace are no longer examined by another judgeship of peace but by the judge of the criminal court of first instance in whose jurisdiction it sits. The closed circuit that made objections against these decisions largely circular was broken for this category.
The objection does not suspend the decision, although the authority may order that it be suspended. Where the prosecutor's opinion is taken on an objection against a detention decision or a refusal to release, that opinion must be communicated to the suspect, the defendant or counsel, who have three days to respond. The objection is decided without a hearing unless the authority considers one necessary. Its decision is final — except that a detention decision made for the first time by the reviewing authority is itself open to objection.
The objection is worth making and is rarely decisive. Its real value is that it fixes the defence position in the file at an early date and creates the record that later applications — including any application to the Constitutional Court — will rely on. Counsel who treat the objection as the main event and the monthly reviews as routine have the weight the wrong way round.
Review of an objection is usually brief. It is also responsive: the more precisely the objection is drawn — to the reasoning actually given, on the facts actually in the file — the more seriously it is treated. Objections do succeed. They are not, on any realistic assessment, likely to, and a strategy that rests on one has a single point of failure.
Where the grounds for detention exist, the court may order judicial control instead. The measures are a closed list of twelve, set out in Article 109(3) of the Code: not leaving the country; reporting at stated intervals to places the judge designates; complying with supervision requirements relating to summonses, professional activity or continuing education; not using vehicles, and surrendering the driving licence against receipt; submitting to treatment or examination, including hospitalisation, for dependency; depositing a sum by way of security, in instalments if the judge so directs; not possessing or carrying weapons, and surrendering those held; providing security for the rights of the victim; providing security for family obligations and maintenance; not leaving the home; not leaving a defined area of residence; and not going to defined places or areas.
Two features of the provision are worth extracting.
Judicial control is available even where detention is prohibited. Where the law bars detention for the offence, Article 109(2) provides that the judicial control provisions may still be applied — so the answer to "they could not have detained him" is not that nothing could be imposed.
And it is the standard destination when a detention ceiling expires. A person released because the statutory detention periods have run out may be placed under judicial control (Article 109(7)). The restriction described in the next section therefore frequently begins on precisely the day the detention ceiling is reached.
For a foreign national the combination that occurs in practice is narrow and predictable: the prohibition on leaving the country, with the travel document dealt with accordingly, and periodic reporting.
This is the part with no equivalent in most English-language material, and it is the reason this page exists.
Set the two ceilings side by side — detention under Article 102, judicial control under Article 110/A, added in 2021 — and something appears that is not, so far as we are aware, stated anywhere in English.
Outside the assize court's jurisdiction — Detention: 1 year + 6 months = 18 months · Judicial control: 2 years + 1 year = 3 years
Within the assize court's jurisdiction — Detention: 2 years + 3 years = 5 years · Judicial control: 3 years + 3 years = 6 years
Constitutional-order categories and counter-terrorism offences — Detention: 2 years + 5 years = 7 years · Judicial control: 3 years + 4 years = 7 years
Children — Detention: half under fifteen, three-quarters under eighteen · Judicial control: half
In the ordinary assize-court category, the lesser measure may lawfully last a year longer than the greater one. A person who could not have been detained beyond five years can remain under judicial control — reporting, travel document surrendered, prohibition on leaving the country — for six.
And none of that time counts for anything. Time spent under judicial control may not be deducted from the sentence: under Article 109(6) it is not treated as a restriction of personal liberty for that purpose. There are two exceptions, and the travel ban is not one of them — the deduction is available only for the treatment obligation and for house arrest, and for house arrest at the rate of two days for one.
So six years of being unable to leave the country produces no credit against a sentence eventually imposed, while eighteen months in custody produces eighteen months of credit. That asymmetry is worth putting in front of a client who is weighing whether to press for release on conditions.
Three rules decide the expiry date, and none of them is intuitive.
It runs from the decision. The period runs from the date of the decision imposing the measure. Where the person was detained and is released on judicial control, it is still the date of that decision, not the date of any later event.
Detention time does not count toward it. The two run separately. Time already spent in custody is not set against the judicial-control maximum, so a person detained for eighteen months and then released under judicial control faces the full period from the date of release — in an ordinary assize matter, up to six further years.
It does not end by itself. When the maximum is reached, the measure is not lifted of the court's own motion. An application must be made, and the competent authority must decide it. Nothing in the system produces the release of a restriction on the day it expires.
To which should be added a fourth, because it works in the same direction. The rule that excludes post-judgment time from the detention ceiling is applied in practice to judicial control as well: time spent while the case is before the appellate courts is not counted toward the judicial-control maximum either. The position is contested. But a client should not be advised on the assumption that this clock keeps running during an appeal, because in practice it does not — which pushes the real-world end of the restriction further out again.
The three rules together give the arithmetic that clients are never given. Detained on arrest, released at month eighteen on judicial control, in an ordinary assize-court file: the detention time counts toward a five-year ceiling it never reached, the travel restriction begins on the day of release, and it may lawfully run for six years from that date — seven and a half years from the arrest — after which it still does not lapse until someone asks.
That is why the question in §12 is the one to ask first.
Judicial control has its own statutory maximum, and it is long. In matters outside the jurisdiction of the assize court the period is two years, extendable by one further year on stated grounds. In matters within the jurisdiction of the assize court it is three years, extendable — the extension not exceeding three further years, or four where the offence falls within the constitutional-order categories or the counter-terrorism legislation. For children the periods are halved.
In other words: a person released at the second month of an assize-court file can lawfully remain unable to leave Türkiye for six years, and for seven in the heaviest categories. The measure is reviewed, and it can be lifted; but it does not lapse on its own, nobody is obliged to volunteer that it can be challenged, and its expiry date is not communicated.
This is the domestic mirror of the problem described in our page on checking INTERPOL and warrant exposure before travelling: the person cannot move, and does not know which authority's decision is the reason.
In practice these bans are imposed readily and are not easily removed. Removal is nonetheless possible, and what moves an application is a demonstrated need to be abroad rather than a further argument about the merits of the case. A proposed holiday and a documented necessity are different applications.
The needs that are recognised are the ordinary ones: education, employment, an established home and family life in another country, a child's schooling, the applicant's own medical treatment, and accompanying a relative who has to travel for treatment. What makes the application work is specificity. It should identify the dates on which the person needs to be abroad, why their presence matters on those dates, and what follows if they cannot go, supported by documents that show it. An itinerary establishes dates and nothing else: it does not explain why the journey matters, or how the person will remain available to the proceedings. Where the reason concerns a child or a relative under treatment, the applicant's own role has to be explained rather than assumed.
The submission should also address the procedural position directly — compliance to date, attendance when required, the next scheduled step, and any arrangement that is legally available. Where circumstances have changed since the decision was made, the change should be evidenced and tied to the reasoning that was actually given for the restriction. Repeating the defence case without engaging with that reasoning leaves the travel question unanswered.
None of this guarantees removal, and the same account will not succeed before every court.
Judicial control is reviewed under Article 110(4) at intervals of no more than four months — on the prosecutor's request during the investigation, and by the court of its own motion during the trial. Separately, on the application of the suspect or defendant and after the prosecutor's opinion has been taken, the judge or court may decide within five days (Article 111). The decision is open to objection.
The power is wider than removal. New obligations may be added, the existing ones removed in whole or in part, varied, or temporarily suspended. An application that asks only for everything to end forgoes the outcomes in between.
There is also a route that is missed in files where it matters: judicial control rather than detention where the person cannot manage in prison conditions because of serious illness or disability, established in the manner the execution legislation provides, and for a woman who is pregnant or within six months of giving birth.
The first step is to read the operative decision rather than the summary of it. Who imposed the restriction, in which file, on what date, and on what reasoning; and whether a later decision has continued or modified it. A report that the client is "on bail" obscures all of this, and the obligations actually imposed under Turkish procedure are rarely what that phrase suggests. The relief sought should then be defined: removal of the measure, reconsideration in the light of changed circumstances, or permission for a particular journey. These require different factual presentations, and an application that does not say which result it seeks tends to receive none of them.
What moves these applications is almost never legal argument alone. It is a change in the underlying facts: a fixed address that can be verified, employment, a deposited passport, security provided, a completed evidential step that removes the interference rationale, a co-defendant's position that has been resolved. The application that succeeds is generally the one that hands the court a reason it can write down.
Where the ordinary routes have been used and the detention continues, an individual application to the Constitutional Court on the lawfulness, the length or the reasoning of detention is available, subject to a thirty-day time limit running from the exhaustion of the ordinary remedy (Law No. 6216, Article 47(5)).
It is a slow route and it does not stop the proceedings. It is nevertheless the point at which the record built in the monthly reviews — the file of specific, unanswered defence submissions — either exists or does not.
Five things decide what can be done, and all five are knowable within a day:
which court the file is before, and whether it is an assize-court matter;
whether an indictment has been accepted, because access to the file and the applicable ceilings both change at that moment;
the date of the detention or judicial control decision, and the date of the last review;
whether the offence charged falls within the catalogue, and whether it falls within the constitutional-order or counter-terrorism categories, because the ceilings differ; and
whether a separate immigration decision exists.
A favourable decision needs reading as carefully as an adverse one: which obligation has actually changed, whether the decision carries conditions, which authorities have to receive it before it takes effect, and whether a separate file carries a restriction of its own. Travel should be planned on the confirmed position, not on the decision's first paragraph.
Where a client is under judicial control rather than detained, the single most useful question to ask is the one nobody asks: on what date does the measure reach its statutory maximum. For multi-defendant and organised-crime files, that date is frequently years away and frequently unknown to the client.
We are happy to be contacted with the case number alone; the rest can be established from the file.
This article describes the framework, not the outcome of any particular case. Detention and judicial control decisions turn on the facts of the individual file and on the practice of the court seized of it, which varies. The periods stated are statutory ceilings, not expected durations. Immigration measures are governed by separate legislation and are summarised here only so far as they interact with criminal proceedings. Nothing here is advice on a specific matter, and no lawyer–client relationship arises from reading it.
This publication is general information and does not constitute legal advice for a specific matter.