Duty Lawyer or Private Counsel in Türkiye: what changes if you wait to give your statement

Turkish criminal procedure calls defence counsel müdafi. Before your statement is taken you are asked to choose one yourself. Under CMK 150/1, if you declare that you are not in a position to choose a lawyer, one is appointed on your request. The request matters; silence is not read as a request.

In three situations no request is needed. CMK 150/2 requires an appointment without any request where a suspect has no counsel and is a child, is disabled to a degree that prevents self-defence, or is deaf and mute. CMK 150/3 applies the same automatic appointment to any investigation or prosecution concerning an offence whose lower statutory limit is more than five years' imprisonment. It is the lower limit written into the offence provision that decides this, not the sentence anyone expects you to receive.

The appointment is made by the bar association of the place where the investigation is conducted, on the request of the authority taking your statement or the judge conducting the questioning (CMK 156/1-a and 156/2). At an Istanbul police station that means the duty roster of the Istanbul Bar.

Waiting is not open-ended. Under CMK 91/1 custody may not exceed twenty-four hours from the moment of arrest, excluding the time strictly necessary to bring you before the nearest judge or court, which itself may not exceed twelve hours. Where the offence was committed collectively, CMK 91/3 allows the prosecutor to extend custody by written order, each extension no more than one day and no more than three days in total, on the ground that gathering evidence is difficult or the suspects are numerous.

That period is the entire window in which your first statement will be taken. If you are not released, CMK 91/7 requires you to be brought before the sulh ceza hâkimi and questioned before it expires, with counsel present. Where detention is sought, CMK 101/3 again gives you a lawyer of your own choosing or one appointed by the bar. A lawyer will be beside you either way; the live question is which one, and how much that person knows on arrival. What is decided at that hearing is set out in remand, judicial control and release.

Under CMK 149/1 you may be assisted by one or more lawyers at every stage of the investigation and the trial, and CMK 156/3 ends the appointed lawyer's duty as soon as you instruct your own. Retaining private counsel later therefore costs you nothing procedurally. Up to three lawyers may attend statement-taking in the investigation phase (CMK 149/2).

What does not reset is the statement. One protection exists: under CMK 148/4 a statement taken by the police without counsel present cannot be relied on in the judgment unless you confirm it before a judge or court. That rule guards against a statement given with no lawyer at all. It does nothing about a statement given with a lawyer who first saw the file twenty minutes earlier.

File access is where the practical difference sits. CMK 153/1 lets defence counsel examine the investigation file and take copies free of charge. CMK 153/2 allows a judge, on the prosecutor's request, to restrict that access where it would endanger the purpose of the investigation — but only in a closed list of investigations, among them intentional killing, sexual assault, sexual abuse of children, drug manufacture and trafficking, forming an organisation to commit crime, offences against state security and the constitutional order, and the offences defined in Anti-Smuggling Law No. 5607. Even then, CMK 153/3 keeps three things open: the record of your own statement, expert reports, and the records of any step you were entitled to attend.

If you cannot explain yourself adequately in Turkish, an interpreter is appointed — in the investigation phase by the judge or the prosecutor (CMK 202/3) — and under CMK 324/5 the interpreter's cost is not treated as a trial cost and is borne by the Treasury. That duty exists whichever lawyer stands beside you; how interpretation is used, and where it goes wrong, is covered in interpreter rights in a Turkish criminal case.

Two further rules shape the first hours. Under CMK 95/2, where the person arrested or held in custody is a foreign national, the consulate of their state is notified unless they object in writing. Under CMK 154/1 you may meet your lawyer at any time, without a power of attorney, in conditions where others cannot hear you, and your correspondence with that lawyer cannot be subjected to monitoring. The exception is narrow. CMK 154/2 permits a judge, on the prosecutor's request, to restrict the meeting for twenty-four hours in investigations into the state-security, constitutional-order, national-defence and state-secrets and espionage chapters of the Turkish Criminal Code (Chapters Four to Seven of Part Four of Book Two), offences within the Anti-Terror Law, and drug manufacture and trafficking committed within an organisation — and during those twenty-four hours no statement may be taken from you at all.

Relatives outside Türkiye usually learn of the arrest through the CMK 95 notification or a single phone call. What they can and cannot do from abroad is set out in the note for the family of a detainee.

Three questions settle it in practice.

• Has the accusation been explained to you? CMK 147/1-b requires the offence attributed to you to be stated, and CMK 147/1-e requires you to be told that remaining silent about it is your legal right. If neither has happened, the interview is not ready to begin.
• Does the lawyer beside you act for anyone else in the same file? Where several people were detained together and their accounts may diverge, one lawyer cannot serve all of them — CMK 152 permits a single advocate to defend several suspects only where their interests conform. Say so, and ask that a different advocate be assigned.
• Can your own counsel physically arrive inside the custody period? If yes, CMK 149/3 protects the lawyer's right to meet you and to be present, and the request to wait should be recorded in the tutanak. If not, the realistic plan is to proceed with the appointed lawyer, keep the statement narrow, and instruct your own counsel before the questioning under CMK 91/7.

None of this makes the appointed lawyer a formality. It makes the timing of the first statement the decision that matters. The full sequence of those first hours — notification, custody, statement, and the hearing that follows — is set out in the guide to being arrested in Türkiye.