INSIGHTS
What remains when Türkiye will not surrender its own national: jurisdiction over conduct abroad, transfer of proceedings, the channel foreign evidence must arrive through, and the deadlines nobody abroad is told about.
What replaces extradition when the nationality bar applies: the jurisdiction Turkish courts have over conduct abroad, how proceedings are transferred, and what a foreign file has to contain before any of it works.
Law stated as at 13 October 2026. There is no official English translation of the Turkish provisions discussed; translations are the author's own and the Turkish text governs.
Türkiye (Turkey) does not surrender its own nationals. The rule is Article 11/1-a of the Law on International Judicial Cooperation in Criminal Matters (Law 6706), it is not discretionary, and the only exception concerns obligations arising from being a party to the International Criminal Court. The full procedure in which it sits is described in our article on extradition from Türkiye.
It is also not the only bar in that list. A request is equally refused where the act falls within Türkiye's own jurisdiction (Article 11/1-c-4), and where the person has already been acquitted or convicted in Türkiye for the act (Article 11/1-ç). Nationality is simply the one that arises most often, and it sits inside our wider work on extradition and INTERPOL red notices.
Foreign counsel and foreign authorities tend to draw the wrong conclusion from it, in one of two directions. Some conclude that nothing can be done, and close the file. Others send an extradition request anyway, wait a year, and receive a refusal that was predictable on day one.
Neither is right. The bar removes one route and leaves several. A person who cannot be surrendered can still be prosecuted — in Türkiye, for conduct committed abroad, on evidence gathered abroad, with the foreign victim participating. Whether that happens depends almost entirely on how the foreign side approaches it in the first three months.
The starting point is that Turkish criminal law is not confined to conduct in Türkiye. Which provision applies depends on the nationality of the person, the nationality of the victim, and the sentence the conduct attracts in Turkish law.
Where the person is a Turkish national. Under Article 11/1 of the Turkish Criminal Code (Law 5237), a Turkish national who commits abroad an offence carrying a prison sentence whose lower limit is not less than one year may be punished under Turkish law, provided they are present in Türkiye, no judgment has been given abroad for that offence, and the matter is prosecutable in Türkiye. Where the lower limit is below one year, prosecution depends on the complaint of the injured party or of the foreign government, and that complaint must be made within six months of the national's entry into Türkiye (Article 11/2). That six-month period is the deadline most often missed, because nobody abroad is told it has started.
Where the person is a foreign national. Article 12 splits three ways, and the distinction matters because it determines who must act. An offence committed abroad to the detriment of Türkiye carrying a lower limit of at least one year is prosecuted on the request of the Minister of Justice (Article 12/1). An offence to the detriment of a Turkish national, or of a private legal person established under Turkish law, is prosecuted on the complaint of the injured party — not on a ministerial request — provided no judgment has been given abroad (Article 12/2). Where the victim is also a foreign national, the route exists but is narrow: the Minister's request, a lower limit of not less than three years, and either no extradition treaty or an extradition request that the state of the offence or of the perpetrator's nationality has refused (Article 12/3). For bribery and trading in influence, no ministerial request is needed at all (Article 12/5).
Three further provisions decide files and are rarely raised abroad.
Where the offence carries a choice between imprisonment and a judicial fine, no investigation or prosecution is opened at all in Article 11 and Article 12 cases (Article 14). A charge that looks serious in the requesting state can fall at this point.
A sentence imposed in Türkiye for conduct committed outside Turkish sovereignty may not exceed the upper limit of the sentence provided by the law of the country where the offence was committed (Article 19). The foreign law therefore sets a ceiling even though the Turkish characterisation governs everything else.
Time spent abroad in custody, under observation, in detention or serving a sentence for the same offence is set off against the Turkish sentence, wherever the offence was committed (Article 16).
Whether a foreign judgment closes the route is not one question but several. For an offence committed abroad by a Turkish national, a judgment given abroad — conviction or acquittal — bars the Turkish prosecution under Article 11/1. For an offence committed in Türkiye, a judgment given abroad does not bar anything: the person is retried in Türkiye (Article 9). For the Article 12/1 category, a foreign conviction, acquittal, or a case that has lapsed does not close the matter either; the person is retried on the Minister's request (Article 12/4). And for the offences listed in Article 13, retrial follows a foreign conviction or acquittal on the Minister's request (Article 13/3). The answer turns on where the conduct occurred and which provision is engaged, and assuming a general double-jeopardy protection across all of them is the most common analytical error in this area.
How these matters start in practice is worth knowing. Where a foreign state becomes aware that the person is in Türkiye, it is generally the foreign authority that writes first; the Turkish prosecutor's office that receives the material then obtains the Minister's request where the provision requires one, which is a different step from the Ministry's role in cooperation between states — §3 separates the two. A request drafted on the assumption that a Turkish investigation already exists tends to arrive in the wrong place and to wait there.
Every route in this article passes through the Ministry of Justice, and foreign counsel routinely underestimate how much is decided there. Under Article 2/1-b of Law 6706 the Central Authority is the Ministry of Justice, and Article 3 gives it the decisions that shape a file before any Turkish court sees it.
It decides whether a foreign state's cooperation request is accepted at all, and whether a Turkish authority's outgoing request is appropriate (Article 3/1-a). It decides which type of cooperation applies and which method will be followed (Article 3/1-b) — so the choice between mutual assistance and transfer of proceedings is proposed by the requesting side but settled here. It consents to the use of the information and documents supplied, and may limit that use or make it conditional or subject to guarantees (Article 3/1-c).
Three further powers are worth knowing before a request is drafted. Where there is no legal and factual reciprocity with the requesting state, execution may be made conditional on that state guaranteeing it will meet Türkiye's equivalent requests (Article 3/2), and execution may in any event be made subject to conditions or guarantees (Article 3/3). Conditions the Central Authority accepts, and guarantees it gives, bind the judicial authorities (Article 3/4) — which means an undertaking given at ministry level is not a diplomatic courtesy but something the court must work within. And a request may simply be turned back where there is clear disproportion between the gravity of the offence and the effort and cost of executing it, or where it concerns steps a state habitually declines to take (Article 3/6).
A request may also be refused outright on grounds that have nothing to do with the merits: where it would violate Türkiye's sovereign rights, national security, public order or other fundamental interests; where the act is a purely military, thought or political offence, or connected with one; where there are credible reasons to believe the person would be prosecuted, punished, tortured or ill-treated because of race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, membership of a social group or political opinion; or where the requesting state lacks the basic guarantees of the right of defence (Article 4/1). Where this Law and other laws are silent, the Code of Criminal Procedure applies (Article 5).
The Minister's request under the Criminal Code is a different thing, and the two are constantly confused. The request in Articles 12/1 and 12/3, and the Minister's demand in Article 13/2, is a condition of prosecution in Turkish domestic law: without it the prosecutor cannot proceed, whatever any foreign state has sent. The Central Authority's functions above concern cooperation between states. A file can satisfy one and fail the other, and correspondence that treats "sending it to the Ministry" as a single step tends to produce a long silence.
Where the foreign state's own case cannot be completed because the person is in Türkiye, the instrument is the transfer of proceedings rather than extradition. Articles 23 to 25 of Law 6706 govern it, in both directions, under treaties where they exist and on reciprocity where they do not (Article 23/2) — which matters for states with no bilateral instrument.
Türkiye may take over an investigation or prosecution for an offence committed abroad carrying a prison sentence with an upper limit of one year or more, provided the offence is not time-barred or amnestied under Turkish law (Article 25/1). The request is refused where the person is not habitually resident in Türkiye, where the person is not a Turkish national, where the offence was committed outside the requesting state's own borders, or where the person has already been tried in Türkiye for the act. On the Central Authority's approval the request goes to the competent public prosecutor, who opens an investigation into the offence and proceeds accordingly (Article 25/2).
The rules on transferring out are the mirror image: an upper limit of one year or more, and either that the suspect is a foreign national who cannot be kept present in Türkiye or whose defence cannot be taken through mutual assistance, or that a Turkish suspect is habitually abroad or the evidence is there (Article 24/1). Those requests are made by the judicial authorities and sent on the Central Authority's favourable opinion, and making one does not stop the Turkish proceedings in the meantime (Article 24/2). The routing through the Central Authority is described in our article on mutual legal assistance.
The transfer is not a formality and it is not automatic. It converts a foreign file into a Turkish investigation, which means the foreign material has to survive translation into a Turkish procedural framework — and that is where these matters are won or lost.
A transferred file that arrives as a bundle of foreign-language documents and a summary produces nothing.
What is needed is the same in every one of these matters: the conduct alleged, specified in a way that maps onto an offence in Turkish law rather than onto the foreign charge label; the evidence identified item by item, with its provenance; the procedural authority under which each item was obtained; certified copies rather than working copies; and translation that a Turkish prosecutor can put in front of a court.
The single most common failure is characterisation. A charge that is straightforward in the requesting state may have no direct equivalent here, or may correspond to an offence with a different threshold, a different limitation period and different evidential requirements. Where the conduct is put forward as organised, the structural requirements described in our article on Article 220 and organisation liability have to be satisfied on Turkish criteria, not on the foreign indictment's assertion.
Two deficiencies recur. The underlying data is not supplied — the file arrives as reports and summaries rather than as the material they were drawn from. And documents arrive in working rather than authenticated form.
Neither always stops the matter proceeding here. Part of the reason is in the statute itself, and is explained in §6: where material arrives through transfer of proceedings or through formal mutual assistance, the law deems the foreign acts valid, and the transmission chain is not examined in the way it would be if the same material had arrived informally. The remainder is a matter of practice rather than rule: authenticity is frequently not tested even where the statutory basis for deeming it valid is absent. That describes what happens, not what the rule requires, and the distance between the two is where the argument in §6 lives.
Material gathered abroad does not become usable here merely because it was lawful where it was gathered. What governs is the channel it arrived through, and there are three.
Through formal mutual assistance. Acts carried out by the requested state in accordance with its own domestic law, within a mutual assistance request, are deemed valid for the purposes of Turkish law (Article 7/1-ç of Law 6706). The requesting authority may also ask to be present when the act is carried out (Article 7/1-c), and may ask for provisional measures to preserve evidence before the request itself is made where delay is prejudicial (Article 7/1-a).
Through transfer of proceedings. Investigation and prosecution acts performed under the legislation of the requesting state, and the evidence obtained, are likewise deemed valid for Turkish law (Article 25/3). This is the provision that does the most work in practice and the one least often cited abroad.
Through anything else. Where material has not come through either channel, the test applied by the courts is the one developed in the encrypted-platform case law: the material must have been obtained within the framework of foreign judicial decisions, transmitted to the Turkish authorities through proper channels of international cooperation, and transmitted with its integrity preserved. Material sent informally, agency to agency, may be unusable however probative it is. This is developed, with the case law, in our article on encrypted platform material in Turkish proceedings.
The practical consequence for a requesting state is that the route by which evidence arrives is part of the evidence, and choosing the route is a decision taken at the beginning, not a formality attended to at the end.
One condition attaches to everything that arrives through cooperation. Information and documents received may not be used outside the investigation, prosecution or enforcement to which the request related, unless the sending state permits it (Article 6/1). Permission is not required where the legal characterisation of the offence changes, where new suspects emerge after the cooperation step, or where the material is needed in civil proceedings connected to the same offence (Article 6/2). The wider framework is set out in our article on mutual legal assistance.
Turkish limitation periods run on Turkish criteria and on the Turkish characterisation of the offence. Under Article 66/1 of the Criminal Code the periods run from eight years, for offences carrying up to five years or a judicial fine, to thirty years for offences carrying aggravated life imprisonment, with fifteen years for offences carrying more than five and less than twenty. The period is fixed by the upper limit of the sentence the offence carries in the statute (Article 66/4), not by the sentence anyone expects, and it runs from the day the completed offence was committed — or, for a continuing offence, from the day the continuation ended, and for a chain of offences, from the last one (Article 66/6). Suspension and interruption are governed by Article 67.
These periods do not pause because a foreign investigation is continuing, and they are not extended by the time a requesting state spends deciding whether to send a request.
The point is sharper than general prudence. A transfer of proceedings is refused outright where the offence is already time-barred under Turkish law (Article 25/1 of Law 6706). In files that have already run for years abroad, the limitation position should therefore be established before anything else is prepared. It is not unusual for it to be the answer.
Where there is an injured party abroad — which, in financial-crime files, is the normal position — that person is not merely a source of evidence. Under Article 237/1 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (Law 5271), the victim, natural and legal persons harmed by the offence, and those financially liable may join the prosecution as a participant. A foreign company is therefore not excluded, which is the question most often asked and most often assumed to have the opposite answer.
There is a deadline, and it is not the one people expect. Participation may be sought at any stage of the first-instance proceedings until judgment is given, and it cannot be requested for the first time on appeal; a request made and refused at first instance is examined on appeal only if the appeal expressly says so (Article 237/2). The application is made by petition to the court after the prosecution has been brought, or orally on the record at the hearing, and the court rules after hearing the prosecutor and the defence (Article 238). Participation does not stay the proceedings, and a hearing already fixed goes ahead on its date even where the participant could not be notified in time (Article 240).
There is also an obstacle that neither side can design around. Where evidence has to be taken from a person abroad, it is taken by letters rogatory, and those requests stall in the administrative chain between the authorities often enough that the delay should be assumed rather than hoped against. One route can shorten it: a mutual assistance request may be asked to be executed by video and audio link (Article 9 of Law 6706). Where a Turkish authority asks for this, the examination is conducted under Turkish direction and Turkish law; where a foreign authority asks, it is conducted under that state's direction with Turkish judicial authorities present. In both cases it is available only where a treaty between the states provides for it, which is why it is worth establishing at the outset whether the applicable instrument does, rather than discovering months later that it does not.
Where the foreign proceedings finished before the person left, the question is no longer prosecution but enforcement, and it is governed by a separate part of the same framework.
A foreign conviction may be enforced in Türkiye where the conditions in Article 26 of Law 6706 are met together: the sentenced person is in Türkiye, the conviction is final, the act is an offence under Turkish law and not time-barred, and — for custodial sentences, unless the central authorities decide otherwise — at least six months of the sentence remains to be served at the date of the request. Transfer of a sentenced person to Türkiye runs on its own conditions in Article 30: Turkish nationality or strong social ties, the consent of the person or their legal representative, a final conviction, and an act that is an offence under Turkish law.
These are distinct regimes with their own conditions, and they are frequently conflated with extradition in correspondence. They deserve their own treatment, and this article does not attempt it.
For the defence, the nationality bar is protection against surrender and nothing more. It does not stop a Turkish investigation, it does not stop a red notice, and it does not stop asset measures. A client who has been told they are "safe in Türkiye" has usually been told only the first of those.
For counsel instructing from abroad, the sequence that works is the reverse of the usual one. Establish the Turkish characterisation and the limitation position first — because the characterisation fixes the threshold in Articles 11 and 12, and the limitation position can end the matter under Article 25/1 before anything is drafted. Decide between transfer of proceedings and a domestic complaint second, remembering that where the victim is a Turkish national or Turkish company the complaint route under Article 12/2 does not need a ministerial request at all. Prepare the evidence in transmissible form third, and make the case for the channel deliberately, because Articles 7/1-ç and 25/3 do work that no amount of later argument can replace. The channel is proposed, not chosen: Article 3/1-b leaves the type of cooperation and the method to the Ministry, so the request has to show why the route it asks for is the right one rather than assume it. An extradition request sent before that analysis is a year spent confirming a rule that was known at the start.
One observation from practice: the files that run are, as a rule, the ones arriving from European states. They come better prepared, and the cooperation behind them is treated more seriously at both ends.
Our page for foreign counsel sets out how we work with instructing firms, and we can be contacted at the point where the question is still which route to use.
This article describes the routes that remain when surrender is barred by nationality. Whether any of them is available in a particular matter depends on the characterisation of the conduct in Turkish law, the limitation position, the evidence and the treaty framework between the states concerned. Enforcement of foreign judgments and transfer of sentenced persons are separate regimes and are mentioned here only to distinguish them. 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.