INSIGHTS
Who may examine a Turkish criminal file, what a restriction decision closes, how instructions are given from abroad, and what a document needs before a foreign court reads it.
Who may examine the file, what a restriction decision actually closes, how instructions are given from another country, what has to be done to a Turkish document before a foreign court will look at it, and how to read what arrives.
Law stated as at 29 September 2026. There is no official English translation of the Turkish provisions discussed; translations are the author's own and the Turkish text governs.
There are two ways material leaves a Turkish criminal file, and they have nothing to do with each other.
The first is state to state. A foreign authority asks Türkiye (Turkey) for evidence, through the Central Authority, under the regime described in our article on mutual legal assistance requests. It is formal, it is slow, it is subject to conditions on use, and it is available only to authorities.
The second is the defence route. A lawyer instructed by the suspect or defendant examines the file and takes copies of it. It is not a request to a foreign ministry, it does not depend on reciprocity, and in an ordinary file it takes days rather than months.
Foreign counsel routinely start the first when the second would answer the question. Where the client is a party to the Turkish proceedings, the defence route is almost always the right one, and the assistance route is reserved for material that the defence is not entitled to obtain, or that a foreign court will only accept through official channels.
Nothing can be examined until someone is properly instructed, and this is where most delay is created.
A lawyer acting for a suspect or defendant acts as defence counsel, which is a different capacity from acting as an attorney in civil matters. What follows from that is not local custom but a statutory line, and it runs between two things that instructing firms usually treat as one.
Examining the file does not require a power of attorney. Under Article 46 of the Advocacy Act, Law No. 1136, a lawyer may examine case and enforcement files without producing one, and compliance with that request is mandatory for the office holding the file. Article 2 of the same Act obliges public authorities to make the documents a lawyer needs available for inspection. Conferring with the client is also outside the requirement: under Article 154 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, Law No. 5271, the suspect or defendant may meet defence counsel at any time without a power of attorney being sought, and Article 149 provides that the lawyer's right to meet the client and to be present during questioning cannot be prevented or restricted.
Taking copies does require one. Both provisions say so in terms: a lawyer who does not produce a power of attorney is not given copies of the documents in the file (Article 46), and taking copies from other institutions is conditional on producing one (Article 2). That single line explains most of the first week. What a Turkish lawyer can read on the day the matter is raised, and what can be sent abroad, are separated by a document that has to travel.
Some acts need more than general authority. Withdrawing an appeal already lodged requires the lawyer to have been given that power expressly in the instrument (Article 266(2) of the Code of Criminal Procedure). A power of attorney drawn for civil litigation routinely omits authorities of this kind, and the omission is discovered on the day the authority is needed rather than when the document is signed.
For the parts of the work that require a formal power of attorney, a client abroad has two routes: execution before a Turkish consulate, or execution before a local notary followed by apostille and sworn translation. Consular execution is itself a Turkish official act — the Hague Apostille Convention does not apply to documents executed by consular agents (Article 1), so that route ends at the consulate rather than continuing through an apostille. Waiting times turn on the post rather than on any general rule and are usually short.
One qualification matters for expectations. As a matter of law a notarial or consular power of attorney is not required in a criminal file for everything defence counsel does; in practice it is asked for. An instruction that proceeds on the statutory position alone will meet resistance at the counter, which is a slower thing to argue with than a legal objection.
The practical advice that follows from this is unglamorous and saves weeks: the power of attorney should be started on the day the matter is first discussed, before anyone decides what the strategy is, because the document takes longer to obtain than the file does.
"The file" is not one document, and asking for it without knowing what it contains produces a large envelope and no answers.
At the investigation stage it will typically hold the records of statements taken, the search and seizure records, communications and traffic data obtained under judicial authorisation, expert reports, the reports prepared by the investigating units, and any decisions on measures — detention, judicial control, seizure, or a decision declaring the defendant a fugitive.
Once an indictment is accepted, the file additionally contains the indictment itself, the court's initial procedural order, the hearing records, the prosecutor's final opinion, and, on conclusion, the reasoned judgment, together with anything filed on appeal.
The document that people abroad most often need is rarely "the file". It is one of four things: the indictment, the decision on measures, the reasoned judgment, or the arrest warrant. Knowing which one is being asked for changes the answer and the cost.
At the investigation stage, Article 153 of the Code of Criminal Procedure entitles defence counsel to examine the contents of the file and to take copies of the documents, free of charge.
That right can be restricted. A restriction is decided by a judge on the public prosecutor's application, on the ground that examination would endanger the purpose of the investigation, and — since the position was tightened — it is available only for the offences listed in Article 153(2). The list covers the categories that bring most international files to Türkiye: offences connected with a criminal organisation, drug trafficking, offences against the security of the State and the constitutional order, espionage, and certain arms, banking and smuggling offences, alongside the most serious offences against the person.
The restriction is not total. Article 153(3) places three categories outside it: the record of the statement of the person arrested or of the suspect, expert reports, and the records of proceedings the person was entitled to be present at. In principle it therefore remains possible, in a restricted file, to establish what the person is alleged to have said and what happened at the hearings they could have attended.
In practice the position is narrower than the provision reads, and the difference is set out below.
An objection lies against a restriction decision. In practice it does not secure removal, and there is no separate route that opens a restricted file as a whole. A plan that depends on the restriction being lifted is a plan built on the exception.
What is available instead is partial, and worth knowing precisely. Where a MASAK report forms part of the investigation, the prosecutor's office will in practice permit counsel to inspect the sections concerning the client, on the office's own premises, and to take notes — but not to take a copy. What results is a record of an inspection, and it should be described to instructing counsel as exactly that, rather than as a copy or a translation of the report. The remainder of the report stays unavailable, and the lawyer receiving the account cannot check it against an original.
Expert reports call for the same caution. They fall within the statutory exception, but in practice requests for them are frequently refused as well. The exception describes what a restriction may not reach. It is not an assurance that the document will be produced.
When the indictment is accepted, the restriction ends and the file is open: Article 153(4) gives defence counsel access to the contents and to the evidence held, and copies of everything, free of charge. That moment is the single most important date in the timetable of anyone advising from abroad, because both what can be seen and what can be done change on it.
It is also the point at which the public prosecution commences and the trial stage begins (Article 175(1)), and the allegation becomes fixed in a form that can be analysed. Advice given before it is advice on a moving object.
Several categories of material that foreign counsel expect to find are not there.
Suspicious transaction reporting is the clearest example. An institution that has reported is prohibited from disclosing that it has done so, and the report itself does not arrive in the criminal file as a matter of course. The consequence — and the reason clients believe their lawyer is not trying — is set out in our article on MASAK measures and seizure.
That does not mean the material is wholly out of reach — what is available in practice, and on what terms, is described in §4. It means that it does not arrive as a document in the file that counsel can copy and send.
Material held by other authorities, and the contents of other files, are not in this file either. Where a person is a suspect in more than one investigation, each has its own number, its own court and its own access position.
And there is no single register that a private person can query to establish whether they are subject to a warrant. What a person can see about themselves through the public administration portals is limited, and a screen showing nothing is not evidence that nothing exists — a point developed, with the international equivalent, in our article on checking exposure before travelling to Türkiye.
The line is simpler than most people assume. A case that has been filed — one in which an indictment has been accepted and proceedings are on foot — is visible. An investigation is not, and this does not depend on whether a secrecy decision has been taken: the investigation stage does not appear on these systems at all.
Establishing whether an investigation exists is therefore not a matter of checking a screen. It is done by enquiry at the offices that might hold it, or through a police records check, and both require someone with standing to make them. A clean screen means that no case has been filed against the person. It does not mean that nothing is open.
A criminal record extract is not a file. It records convictions that have become final, in two layers — the current record and the archive record — with different rules on what appears in each and for how long. The periods are set by Article 12 of Law No. 5352: archive data are deleted entirely on the person's death; where the conviction is one that causes a loss of rights under Article 76 of the Constitution or under a statute outside the Criminal Code, after fifteen years if an order restoring the forfeited rights has been obtained and after thirty years if it has not; and, for all other convictions, five years from the date the record became archivable. They are also deleted where the conduct ceases to be an offence, and where an acquittal or a decision that no penalty be imposed becomes final following a retrial.
An extract therefore answers a narrow question: has this person been convicted, and does that conviction still appear. It does not answer whether there is an open investigation, whether a warrant exists, or whether a measure is in force. People who obtain a clean extract and conclude that the matter is over have answered a question they did not ask.
A Turkish court document in its original form will not usually be accepted abroad. Three steps stand between the copy and its use.
The copy must be one the court or prosecutor's office has issued and certified. It must then be translated by a sworn translator, and the translation is generally notarised. And where the receiving state requires it, the document is apostilled.
Türkiye has been a party to the Hague Apostille Convention since 29 September 1985. Three points about it are worth having before the first request rather than after a rejection.
Which authority issues the apostille depends on the kind of document, and for court papers it is not the governor's office. For judicial documents Türkiye has designated the presidencies of the judicial commissions at courthouses where a high criminal court sits; for administrative documents, the governor, the district head official or the chief secretary in provinces, and the district head official in towns. The designation records that no charge is made. Court and prosecutor documents fall on the judicial side of that line, and a request sent to the wrong authority is returned rather than forwarded.
An apostille certifies the signature, not the contents. Under Article 3 of the Convention the certificate goes to the authenticity of the signature, the capacity in which the signatory acted and the identity of the seal or stamp. It says nothing about whether the document is accurate, current or complete, and a foreign court told that a decision is "apostilled" has been told only that the signature is genuine.
The Convention covers what a criminal file produces. Article 1 treats documents emanating from an authority or official connected with the courts, expressly including a public prosecutor and a court clerk, as public documents. Between parties, the apostille replaces consular legalisation (Article 2).
Requirements on the receiving side are set by the forum that will read the document, not by Turkish law, and they vary between a court, a regulator and an immigration authority in the same country. They should be confirmed for the specific forum before the chain is started, because each step in it is sequential: the certified copy has to exist before it can be translated, and the translation before anything is apostilled.
Where the receiving forum is a court rather than an administrative body, one further question should be asked at the outset rather than at the end: whether that forum requires the document to have arrived through official channels. If it does, the defence route produces a document the forum will not accept, and the assistance route described in §1 has to be run in parallel from the beginning.
A translated Turkish document raises two questions, and answering one does not answer the other. The first is whether the translation renders the original correctly. The second is what the correctly translated document actually does within the Turkish proceedings.
On the first: fluency is not accuracy. Substantial errors occur, including in matters that have had sustained press attention, and the prominence of a case is no evidence that its translations have been checked. The passages worth testing are the ones a submission depends on, and the test is attribution — who is speaking, who is being addressed, and whose act the verb describes. Surrounding material frequently matters more than the isolated sentence, and a conclusion about a person's location or role should be checked against independent evidence rather than inferred from the wording of a translation. The same care applies where the translation appears to favour the defence.
Where a discrepancy is found, the useful output places four things side by side: the source passage, the translation filed, the proposed rendering, and what the difference changes about the allegation. It should also state which stage has been reached, because a defence objection, a fresh translation and a judicial finding that the original translation was wrong are three different things.
On the second: identify what the document does. An indictment is the prosecution's case, and its acceptance opens the trial stage; it is not a finding. An interlocutory decision may discuss evidence at length while deciding only whether a measure continues. The operative part deserves separate attention, because a long account of the allegation frequently precedes a short order doing something much narrower — continuing a measure, requesting a document, severing proceedings, fixing a hearing. What should be reported abroad is the act the decision performs, the person and file it concerns, and any condition attached to it.
Terminology carries the same risk. The Turkish terms for apprehension, police custody and judicial detention are distinct, and collapsing them into a single English word removes the distinction the advice turns on. Describing judicial control as "bail" imports features the order does not contain. A short explanatory note is more accurate than a familiar-looking equivalent.
Finally, establish whether the document is still current. A decision may have been challenged, varied or superseded, and the bundle should either contain the later order or say plainly that it has not been obtained.
Two constraints sit over all of this.
The investigation stage is confidential, and that confidentiality binds those who take part in it. What defence counsel may lawfully do with material obtained from the file is not unlimited, and the limits matter particularly where the material is to be sent to another jurisdiction, filed in foreign proceedings, or shown to a third party. Where the destination is a submission to the Commission for the Control of INTERPOL's Files, the documents that application actually needs are listed in our article on challenging a red notice of Turkish origin.
Separately, the material is personal data belonging to people other than the client — co-suspects, witnesses, complainants — and sending a file abroad is a transfer with its own rules. Those rules were rewritten on 2 March 2024, and accounts written before that date describe a regime that no longer exists. Under Article 9 of Law No. 6698 as amended, a transfer abroad now rests on one of three tiers: an adequacy decision by the Board for the destination country, sector or organisation, published in the Official Gazette and reviewed at least every four years; failing that, one of four appropriate safeguards — a non-treaty arrangement between public bodies with the Board's permission, binding corporate rules approved by the Board, the standard contract published by the Board, or a written undertaking with the Board's permission; and failing both, a transfer that is occasional only, on one of the grounds the Article lists. The ground that ordinarily fits defence work is the establishment, exercise or protection of a right. Where the standard contract is used, it has to be notified to the Authority within five business days of signature.
Neither constraint prevents proper defence work. Both make it worth agreeing at the outset what will be sent, to whom, and for what purpose, rather than forwarding a file and dealing with the question afterwards.
For counsel instructing from outside Türkiye, the sequence that works is:
the file number, the court or prosecutor's office, and the capacity in which the client appears;
the power of attorney, started immediately;
whether an indictment has been accepted, and whether a restriction decision is in force;
the four documents in §3 that actually answer the question, rather than the file as a whole; and
only then, the certification the receiving forum will require.
For a hearing or an application approaching in another jurisdiction, the output that is actually useful is an access record rather than a bundle: for each document, what was sought, why it matters, the date and form of the request, the response received, and the next available step. Where a document has not been obtained, the record should say which of three things is true — it has been withheld, it has not yet been produced, or it has not been found in the material reviewed. Those are different facts, and a foreign submission that blurs them overstates what the reviewed record establishes.
This is also the order in which a Turkish lawyer can give useful answers. Asked for "everything", the honest answer for the first week is that nothing can be said. Asked in this order, most files produce a position within days.
Our page for foreign counsel sets out how we work with instructing firms, and we can be contacted with the file number alone.
This article describes access, not outcome. What can be examined in a particular matter depends on its stage, the offences alleged and any restriction decision in force. Requirements for powers of attorney, certification and translation are set by the receiving authority and change; they should be confirmed for the specific forum rather than assumed from this page. 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.