Your Family Wants to Talk to the Complainant — and there is no complaint to withdraw

Turkish criminal law divides offences into those the state prosecutes of its own motion and those that depend on a complaint. Only the second group can be ended by a complainant changing their mind. TCK 80 is in the first group. The article says nothing about a complaint, and no complaint is a condition of the investigation or the trial.

The rule your family has probably read about is TCK 73, and it governs the other group. There, a complaint must be made within six months of the day the person entitled to complain learned of the act and the identity of the offender, and withdrawal before the judgment drops the case. That mechanism reaches offences such as persistent following under TCK 123/A, insult under TCK 125, or a threat of damage to property. It does not reach TCK 80, an offence carrying eight to twelve years' imprisonment and a judicial fine of up to ten thousand days.

The same logic runs on the protection side. Under Article 18 of the Regulation on Combating Human Trafficking and Protection of Victims, a person is identified as a trafficking victim whether or not they have made a complaint, and without waiting for the outcome of the investigation or the trial. Identification is an administrative act by the provincial migration authority. A person who says they no longer wish to complain has not undone it.

So a retraction is not a switch. It is a piece of evidence, arriving late, that the court will weigh against the first account, the intercept material, the travel and payment records, and the circumstances in which the retraction itself was produced.

The second question families ask is whether the two sides can settle. Statutory mediation — uzlaştırma — is run under CMK 253, and its scope is fixed by article number, not by how the parties feel about the case.

CMK 253/1 opens three gates. The first covers offences that depend on a complaint; TCK 80 does not. The second is a closed list from the Penal Code, in scope whether or not a complaint is required: intentional injury under TCK 86 excluding its third paragraph, and TCK 88; negligent injury under TCK 89; threat under TCK 106 first paragraph only; violation of the immunity of the dwelling under TCK 116; TCK 117/1 and TCK 119/1-c; theft under TCK 141; abuse of trust under TCK 155 excluding its third paragraph; fraud under TCK 157; TCK 165; TCK 234; and TCK 239 excluding its fourth paragraph. TCK 80 is not on it.

The remaining gate, CMK 253/1-c, is open only for children in the judicial process (adli süreçteki çocuklar), and then only where the victim is a natural or private legal person and the offence carries an upper limit of no more than three years. It does not reach adult suspects at all. The upper limit of TCK 80 is twelve years. Every route is closed, and the mediation bureau will not be sent the file at all. What mediation is and where it genuinely applies is set out under criminal mediation.

This matters practically, because families sometimes believe an informal agreement can later be presented as a settlement. There is no mechanism to receive it. A payment made outside any statutory process does not become a settlement by being described as one.

Remand. Under CMK 100/2-b, a ground of detention exists where the suspect's or defendant's conduct raises strong suspicion of destroying, hiding or altering evidence, or of attempting to put pressure on a witness, a victim or other persons. In a TCK 80 file that ground is easy to establish and hard to answer, because the complainant is by definition the central witness. TCK 79 and TCK 80 were also added by a December 2019 amendment to the catalogue in CMK 100/3, where a ground of detention may be presumed on strong suspicion resting on concrete evidence. A person already on judicial control is returned to custody; a person already in custody loses the argument for release, and that argument does not come round again quickly. Remand in matters before the ağır ceza mahkemesi is capped by CMK 102/2 at two years, extendable on stated grounds by up to three further years. What the release argument consists of is set out under remand and judicial control.

Judicial control. Where release has been granted on obligations under CMK 109, a breach reopens the whole question. CMK 109/3-a — a prohibition on leaving Türkiye — is standard in files of this weight, and contact made in breach of the conditions is treated as a breach of the release itself.

A separate offence. The approach can be charged on its own facts. A threat to kill or injure carries six months to two years under TCK 106/1, with a lower limit of not less than nine months where committed against a woman. Persistently attempting contact — physically, through communications, or through third persons — so as to cause serious disquiet or fear for safety is TCK 123/A: six months to two years, rising to one to three years where the person is already subject to a removal or non-approach order. Contact routed through a cousin or a friend is expressly within the article; see stalking and threats. Destroying, erasing, hiding, altering or spoiling evidence carries six months to five years under TCK 281, and the exemption in the last sentence of 281/1 for a person acting over their own offence does not extend to material concerning anyone else.

Families rarely intend harm. Often the complainant is a neighbour, a relative or a former colleague, and the belief is that one conversation will clear up a misunderstanding. Two things follow that nobody explains at the time.

The first is the residence permit. Under Article 48 of Law no. 6458, a foreigner about whom there is strong suspicion of being a trafficking victim is granted a thirty-day residence permit by the governorate, without the conditions that apply to other permits, and under Article 49 it can be extended in blocks of up to six months to a total not exceeding three years. That permit is cancelled where the person is found to have re-established contact with the perpetrators on their own initiative. A call your family makes, and she answers, can end the protection, the shelter place and the support programme of the very person it was meant to reassure.

The second is that a retraction delivered by the defendant's side is the best evidence the prosecution could ask for on the element it most often struggles with. TCK 80 requires a means — threat, pressure, coercion or violence; abuse of influence; deception; or obtaining consent by using control over the person or their helplessness. A complainant who changes her account after being contacted by the accused's relatives demonstrates exactly that continuing capacity for influence. The document intended to close the case is read as proof of it.

Everything that needs to reach the complainant's account reaches it through the file, and none of it requires a private conversation.

The complainant is already represented. Under CMK 234, a victim without a representative may ask the bar association to appoint a lawyer where the offence carries a minimum sentence of more than five years. The minimum in TCK 80 is eight. There is therefore a lawyer on the other side to whom anything legitimate can be addressed in writing, on the record, by your own counsel.

The account is tested, not renegotiated. The first statements — taken in the opening hours, often through an interpreter whose command of the actual language and dialect was never checked — are examined as they stand. So are the message threads, transfers, tickets and residence records, read in sequence rather than through the extracts in the indictment. Under CMK 202 the essential points of the accusation and the defence are translated by a court-appointed interpreter, at the police station as well as in the courtroom.

Making good the loss. Where compensation is genuinely appropriate it is paid through the proceedings and left to the court, which may allow a discretionary reduction of up to one sixth under TCK 62. It operates on the sentence. It does not end the prosecution, and it is not a reason to open a channel to the complainant.

What is actually contested in these files — the purpose element, the means element, whether the conduct is TCK 80, TCK 79 or TCK 117/2, and what role is attributed to each defendant — is set out on the page for human trafficking under TCK 80. None of it turns on whether a complaint stands.