How to Confirm a Relative Is Really in Custody in Türkiye — and find out where they are held

Families searching for a relative in Türkiye often spend the first day calling the wrong kind of institution. A person can be held under either of two procedures that share almost nothing.

Criminal custody runs under the Code of Criminal Procedure. A person suspected of an offence is apprehended by police, held at a station, and either released or brought before a sulh ceza judge. Under CMK 91/1 the custody period cannot exceed twenty-four hours from the moment of apprehension, not counting the time strictly necessary to transport the person to the nearest judge or court, and that transport time cannot itself exceed twelve hours. The sequence that follows is set out on the first twenty-four hours after an arrest.

Administrative detention runs under Law no. 6458 on Foreigners and International Protection. No offence is alleged. A governorship decides on removal within forty-eight hours, and a foreigner held for that purpose is taken to a removal centre within forty-eight hours of apprehension. Under 6458 art. 57/3 detention there may last up to six months, extendable by up to six further months, but only where the removal cannot be completed because the foreigner does not cooperate or does not provide correct information or documents about their country. Those centres are not police stations and not prisons; see removal centres and administrative detention.

The practical test is time. Criminal custody is measured in hours. If a week has passed and nobody has been before a judge, you are almost certainly looking for the wrong system.

Turkish law does provide for the call. Under CMK 95/1, when a suspect is apprehended, taken into custody, or has that custody extended, a relative or a person of their choosing is informed without delay, on the order of the public prosecutor. CMK 147/1-d repeats the duty at the point the statement is taken: the detained person is told that the relative of their choosing will be informed immediately.

Several things routinely stop that notification reaching a family abroad. The detained person may nominate someone local — a flatmate, an employer, a partner — rather than a parent in another country. The number given from memory may be wrong or written down wrongly. The call may be made in Turkish to a foreign number and go unanswered. And the duty is to inform someone, not to keep informing them as the file moves.

There is a second route that exists specifically for foreigners. Under CMK 95/2, where the person apprehended or held is a foreign national, the situation is notified to the consulate of the state of which they are a citizen, unless the person objects in writing. That objection is a real possibility and a common reason a consulate has no record: some detainees decline consular notification without appreciating that their family will then have no independent confirmation at all.

Location follows procedure. Once you know which stage the file has reached, the building follows from it, and so does the way you confirm it.

Once a person is remanded, contact becomes possible but is not unrestricted. Under Law no. 5275 art. 114/2 a remand prisoner may receive visitors subject to the institution's general rules, and the prosecutor during the investigation — or the court during the trial — may prohibit or restrict visits in the interests of the case. Article 114/3 allows correspondence and telephone calls to be restricted on the same basis. Article 114/5 sets contact with defence counsel apart: it may not be obstructed or restricted — subject to the reservation for special laws in art. 114/6, and to the twenty-four hour restriction a judge may impose under CMK 154/2 for a narrow group of offences.

Relatives have no right of access to a criminal file. Defence counsel does. Under CMK 153/1 a lawyer may examine the contents of the investigation file and take copies of the documents free of charge. That access can be restricted by a judge on the prosecutor's application, but only in the offences listed in CMK 153/2, and even then CMK 153/3 places three things outside the restriction: the record of the detained person's own statement, expert reports, and the records of any proceeding they were entitled to attend. Those three documents alone usually answer where someone is and what is recorded against them.

Access to the person is separate and stronger. CMK 149/1 allows a suspect to benefit from the assistance of one or more defence lawyers at every stage, and CMK 149/3 provides that the lawyer's right to meet the suspect, to be present during the statement or questioning, and to give legal assistance may not be obstructed or restricted. In practice a lawyer instructed by a family abroad can go to the district prosecutor's office, identify the file by name and passport number, and confirm within hours what days of telephone calls will not.

Two things follow from confirmation, and both are time-limited. If the person is in criminal custody, the next decision is whether they are remanded or released on judicial control, which is set out under remand, judicial control and release. If they are in a removal centre, art. 57/6 of Law no. 6458 gives the foreigner, a legal representative or a lawyer a right to apply to the sulh ceza judge, who must conclude the review within five days.

What a family abroad can do in the meantime — including the application that belongs to relatives rather than to the detainee — is set out on the page for families outside Türkiye.