The boat was stopped before it left. Under TCK 79 that does not reduce the sentence.

The last sentence of TCK 79/1 runs to one line, and it is the reason this page exists: where the offence remains at the attempt stage, the sentence is imposed as if the offence had been completed. It was added by Law no. 6008, adopted on 22 July 2010 and published in the Resmî Gazete on 25 July 2010. It was added for a reason the courts had made visible — boats intercepted inside Turkish territorial waters were being treated as attempts, and the sentences were coming down accordingly.

The range it attaches to is unchanged. Five to eight years' imprisonment and a judicial fine of one thousand to ten thousand days, for a person who, by unlawful means and for the purpose of obtaining material benefit, directly or indirectly, brings a foreigner into the country, makes it possible for a foreigner to remain, or makes it possible for a person to leave.

What the clause removed is TCK 35/2. In every other offence, a person who began the execution and could not complete it for reasons outside his control has the sentence reduced by one quarter to three quarters. Applied to this article, that discount was worth years.

The third row is the one that mattered. Two years is the figure at which deferral of the verdict under CMK 231/5 and suspension under TCK 51 become arithmetically reachable. Since 2010, no arithmetic in a TCK 79 file reaches it. The judicial fine is imposed on the same footing, and the fact that the vessel was stopped is not, by itself, a mitigating circumstance.

The clause changes the sentence for an attempt. It does not change what an attempt is, and that distinction carries most of the defence in an interception file.

TCK 35/1 sets the threshold, and it has three parts. The person must have intended the offence; the acts must have been capable of producing it; and he must have begun the execution directly, failing to complete only for reasons outside his control. Everything short of that line is a preparatory act, and preparatory acts are not punished at all.

So where nothing moved, the argument is not how far the sentence should come down. It is whether the conduct crossed from the first row into the second. Renting a house near the coast, agreeing a price, buying lifejackets, driving to a beach at night — each may be evidence of preparation, and none of them is by itself the commencement of execution. Where that line falls is a question of legal characterisation applied to the record, and it is the most useful question to ask in the first week rather than the last.

It also matters who is being asked about. The people being carried are not defendants under this article; the second paragraph calls them mağdur — victims — when it raises the sentence for endangering them. A person found on a beach among others is inside the article only if he acted for the purpose of material benefit, and the word indirectly does real work there. Where an indictment describes control exercised over the people rather than movement of them, the charge actually put may be human trafficking under TCK 80, which is a different framework with a different range.

• Voluntary abandonment (TCK 36). A person who voluntarily abandons the acts of execution, or by his own efforts prevents the offence from being completed, is not punished for the attempt; he is punished only for whatever completed part is itself an offence. That is not a discount, it is a separate provision, and it addresses a different situation from TCK 35 — a choice rather than an interception. Whether it survives the sentence added to 79/1 is argued rather than settled, and the argument turns on whether the stopping was yours or the coast guard's. It is a point to put, not an assumption to build a case on.
• The elements still have to be proved. Sentencing an attempt as a completed offence says nothing about whether the offence was made out. The prosecution must still establish unlawful means and the purpose of obtaining material benefit, directly or indirectly. In an interception file there is usually no arrival, no payment received and no transfer to trace, so purpose is read from arrangements, messages and the accounts of the people carried. That is where these files are thinnest, and it is answered with the documents rather than with a denial.

The increases are fact-bound in a way that an early interception affects. The increase in 79/2-a — by half to two thirds where the offence created a danger to the life of those carried — rests on findings about the vessel, the load, the equipment and the conditions. Where nobody put to sea, the material from which that finding is normally made is smaller, and it should not be conceded merely because the indictment asserts it. The two increases in 79/3, for commission by more than one person and for commission within the activity of an organisation, are answered on the same footing: several names on one indictment is not by itself an organisation.

Because the range did not change, nothing that follows from the range changed either.

• Remand. TCK 79 was added to the catalogue in CMK 100/3 by Law no. 7196 of 6 December 2019. Where there are strong grounds of suspicion resting on concrete evidence, a ground of remand may be presumed, and being stopped before anything happened does not take the file out of that catalogue. Which ceiling applies, and how the clock runs, is set out under remand and judicial control.
• Deferral and suspension. CMK 231/5 and TCK 51 both require a sentence of two years or less. The floor of 79/1 is five. TCK 62, discretionary mitigation of up to one sixth, takes that floor to four years and two months and no further.
• Which court. Law no. 5235 fixes jurisdiction on the upper limit written in the article, with aggravating and mitigating causes left out of account. Eight years sits below the ağır ceza threshold, so the file begins before a single judge in the asliye ceza mahkemesi unless other charges in the same indictment move it.
• On appeal. Whether conduct crossed from preparation into execution is a question of legal characterisation rather than of discretion, which is why it belongs in the grounds and not only in the plea. How that review works is set out under istinaf and temyiz.

A first reading of an interception file should settle three things in order: what the record says was actually done before the stop, whether that is preparation or execution, and what the evidence of material benefit consists of. Everything else — the tier, the increases, the sentencing arithmetic — sits downstream of those answers. Anyone who offers you a figure before reading the coast guard tutanak and the passenger statements is guessing. The full framework, both limbs of 79/1, the four increases and the routes that are closed in this offence, is set out on the migrant smuggling page.