Your Ex Reported Your Messages as Stalking in Türkiye: what a TCK 123/A file looks like

In an ex-partner file the criminal investigation is rarely the first thing you hear about. A protection order under Law no. 6284 can be issued the same day the complaint is made, and where delay is objectionable a law-enforcement chief may order only the four measures in article 5/1 (a) to (d) — no threatening, insulting or humiliating words, immediate removal from the shared home, no approach to her or to the home, school or workplace where she is, and no approach to her relatives, witnesses or children. Such an order lapses of its own accord unless a judge approves it within twenty-four hours (art. 5/2). The measure that decides a messaging file — not disturbing her by communication devices or otherwise — is bent (f), and only the judge can order it; in practice it is the first thing the judge adds. Once approved, a first order may run for up to six months (art. 8/2), and you have two weeks from pronouncement or service to object to the family court, which decides within a week and whose decision is final (art. 9).

The criminal file moves more slowly. What reaches you there is an invitation to give a statement. TCK 123/A/3 makes both investigation and prosecution dependent on a complaint, and TCK 73/1 gives the complainant six months running, under TCK 73/2, from the day she knew both the act and who was behind it. A thread that ended in March can therefore surface in August. Neither the order nor the statement request is a finding that you did anything. What they are is the point from which everything you do next is on the record. If you were taken to a police station rather than sent a letter, the sequence is set out on what happens after an arrest in Türkiye.

TCK 123/A was inserted into the Penal Code by Law no. 7406 of 12 May 2022. Its first paragraph covers persistently following a person physically, or attempting to make contact by using communication and telecommunication devices, information systems or third persons, where this causes serious unease, or causes the person to fear for their own safety or that of a relative. The range is six months to two years. The second paragraph raises it to one to three years in three defined situations, and the third of them is the one foreign nationals walk into unaided.

The distinction is not academic. CMK 100/4 provides that remand cannot be ordered where the upper limit of the prison sentence is not more than two years, other than for offences committed intentionally against bodily integrity. The first paragraph of TCK 123/A sits exactly on that line. The second, at three years, does not. A single message sent after an order has been served is capable of moving the file across it — and the same message is separately answered under Law no. 6284 art. 13 with three to ten days of coercive detention, fifteen to thirty days for each repetition and a total that may not exceed six months, even where the act also constitutes an offence.

The statement in this kind of file is short and predictable. You will be asked whether the number and the accounts are yours, whether the messages produced are yours, whether contact continued after you were asked to stop, and whether you knew about the 6284 order. Every answer is written into a Turkish-language record that you then sign. CMK 202 requires an interpreter where you cannot express yourself adequately in Turkish, at the investigation stage as much as at trial, and messages written in English between two people who share no first language reach the court as somebody else's translation of somebody else's tone.

Complaints in message files arrive as screenshots, and screenshots are chosen. What answers them is the complete exchange in order: who opened each contact, what was replied, whether contact ran in both directions, and at what point stopping was actually asked for. That export exists on your own device and nowhere else you control. Deleting it removes your record, not hers; the complainant holds the thread, and so, usually, does the platform. Where part of the exchange has been posted publicly, or where the complaint also names insulting content, that is a separate charge with its own complaint period, dealt with under TCK 125 and the social media offences.

Withdrawal of the complaint ends the criminal case while proceedings are still running: TCK 73/4 provides that in complaint offences the withdrawal of the person harmed drops the case, and under TCK 73/5 a withdrawal in respect of one co-defendant extends to the others. Withdrawal after the judgment has become final does not stop the sentence being carried out. Three things are not touched by it at all.

• The 6284 order. It is a separate decision of a separate court, on a separate application. It runs until it expires, is varied or is lifted, and a withdrawn criminal complaint does not end it.
• Mediation. There is none to reach for. CMK 253/3 provides that even where investigation and prosecution depend on a complaint, mediation cannot be used in offences against sexual integrity, in persistent following under article 123/A, or in insult. And where an offence within the scope of mediation has been committed together with an out-of-scope offence against the same victim, the mediation provisions do not apply at all — so adding TCK 123/A to a threat allegation under TCK 106/1 closes the settlement route on both.
• Your ability to leave. CMK 109/2 states that the judicial-control provisions may be applied even in cases where remand is prohibited, and CMK 109/3-a is a prohibition on leaving the country. For most foreign suspects here that measure, not custody, decides the next six months; the grounds and the review are set out under remand and judicial control.

One asymmetry is worth knowing before anyone in the family starts thinking about negotiation. CMK 234/1-a-3 entitles a victim who has no lawyer to ask the bar association to appoint one, in persistent following files specifically, at the investigation stage — and CMK 234/1-b-5 repeats it for the trial stage. The complainant will normally be represented. How TCK 123/A, TCK 106 and the older TCK 123 differ in their elements, what the file must establish on persistence and on effect, and how the 6284 track runs alongside the criminal one are set out on the page on stalking and threat allegations in Türkiye.