The Interpreter at Your Police Statement Was Not on the Court's List: how a translated statement is actually challenged

CMK 202/5 says where interpreters are meant to come from: they are selected from among the people on a list drawn up each year by the province's adlî yargı adalet komisyonu, and a judge or prosecutor may also take a name from another province's list. The Regulation made under that paragraph, published on 5 March 2013, sets the calendar. Commissions ask the prosecutors' offices and the criminal courts by 15 September which languages are needed and want the replies by 30 September. The call for applicants is announced by 15 October. Applications are made in person by 31 October, and the Regulation states that petitions filed after that date are not considered. They are assessed by 30 November, and the finished list goes to the Ministry of Justice by 31 December.

Article 6 sets the entry conditions: Turkish citizenship, legal capacity, at least primary-school education, eighteen years of age, no conviction or deferred judgment for the offences listed there, no removal from a profession by discipline, residence or professional activity in that province, and no registration on another commission's list. Article 8 asks for a diploma, licence or certificate in the language — or, where the applicant has none, a written declaration that they know it well enough to do the work. There is no examination.

So the list is not a promise of quality. What it does carry is accountability. Under Article 10 a person newly admitted swears the oath in CMK 64/5 and is bound to six duties: independence, impartiality, honesty, performing the task personally, confidentiality, and acting in conformity with the fundamental principles of adjudication. Article 14 lets the commission strike a name off for conduct incompatible with those duties. A hotel receptionist, a cellmate or the officer working your case has sworn nothing and owes none of it. That is the difference the list makes, and it is the whole of the difference.

Being off the list is a defect in the appointment. It is not, by itself, a rule of exclusion. No article of the Code provides that a statement translated by an unlisted person is unlawfully obtained evidence, and a court told only this will note it and move on.

The exclusion route runs through CMK 217/2 — the charge may be proved by any evidence obtained in accordance with law — read with CMK 206/2-a, which requires the court to refuse evidence put before it where that evidence was obtained contrary to law. On appeal, CMK 289/1-i treats a judgment resting on evidence obtained by unlawful methods as an absolute violation, considered whether or not the petition raises it. To reach that through the interpreter you would have to argue CMK 148: that the statement did not rest on your free will (148/1), and that statements obtained by prohibited methods cannot be evaluated as evidence even where given with consent (148/3). Poor translation and deception are not the same thing, and courts do not treat them as the same.

The second complaint is narrower and succeeds far more often. It is not that the statement must be excluded, but that this Turkish text is not what you said, so nothing should be built on it. That complaint does not need CMK 148 at all. It needs the two provisions below.

Before deciding anything, establish which of the following rows your statement sits in. The answer changes what the argument is for.

Read together, those two articles make the decision in front of you narrow and concrete. If the statement was taken at a police station without a lawyer, it is already a document that cannot ground a conviction — unless you hand it that power by confirming it in front of the judge. Confirming means agreeing that you said what is written. It is not the same as answering the charge. If you did not say it, say so, and ask that the answer be recorded.

CMK 148/5 adds a limit worth knowing: where a fresh statement about the same incident is needed, only the prosecutor may take it, not the police a second time. What is supposed to happen in those first hours, including notification of the right to counsel under CMK 147/1-c and the right to say nothing under CMK 147/1-e, is set out on the page about being arrested in Türkiye.

CMK 221 lists what the duruşma tutanağı must contain. Among the items: the name and surname of the interpreter; the elements showing that all the fundamental rules of procedure were observed; the defendant's statements; and requests, with the reasons where a request is refused. CMK 222 then does something more severe than most defendants expect. How the hearing was conducted, and whether it was conducted in accordance with the procedure laid down in law, can be proved only by the record — and the only allegation that may be made against the record is forgery.

That is why objections about interpretation are won or lost on the day. An objection minuted in the tutanak is a fact for every court that opens the file afterwards. The same objection raised for the first time on appeal is a claim about a hearing whose record says nothing of the kind, and CMK 222 stops you proving the hearing went otherwise.

At the statement stage the equivalent is CMK 147/1-i: the record must state the place and date, the names and titles of those present together with the full identity of the person questioned, whether the required steps were carried out and, if not, why not, that the contents were read and signed, and, where a signature was refused, the reasons for the refusal. Two checks follow from that. Obtain the ifade tutanağı and see whether it names an interpreter at all. Then ask whether that name appears on the province's list for the year — under Articles 9 and 11 of the Regulation the accepted names are posted at the courthouse and published electronically, so the comparison is a matter of record rather than argument.

Decide it against what the statement is doing in the file. Where the case rests on physical evidence and the ifade adds nothing, attacking the translation buys a hearing and little else. Where one sentence in the statement supplies an element that nothing else supplies — that you knew what was in the bag, that the quantity was yours, that you were carrying it for someone — that sentence is the case, and its translation is worth every hour spent on it. This is why the argument surfaces most often in drug files, where the line between use and supply is frequently a line in a translated statement.

The cost, stated plainly: asking for a fresh interpretation puts your own account of what was said into issue. You will be asked what you did say, and the court will measure it against everything else in the file. It is not a free move, and by itself it is not a route to an acquittal, whatever anyone tells you.

Keep the appeal in view from the first hearing. CMK 289/1-h treats restriction of the right of defence by a decision of the court on matters important for the judgment as an absolute violation, considered even where the petition does not raise it — but it needs a court decision to point at, which means a refusal, minuted, with its reasons. Which remedy runs and by when is on the appeals page. How the right works across the case as a whole, who appoints the interpreter, who pays and how much of a hearing is actually translated, is on the interpreter rights page.