Claiming self-defence means admitting the act — and the first statement is where that choice is made.

Turkish law does not treat self-defence as a competing version of the facts. It treats it as a ground that removes criminal liability from an act accepted as yours. TCK 25/1 provides that no penalty is imposed on a person who acts to repel an unjust attack — against their own rights or another's — where the attack is occurring, or where its occurrence or its repetition is certain, and where the response is proportionate to the attack according to the circumstances at that moment.

Every element of that provision presupposes an act. Something was repelled, and you repelled it. A court cannot apply TCK 25/1 to a person whose account is that they were not there, that the knife was not theirs, or that they do not know how the injury happened. Those are denials, and a denial and a self-defence claim cannot be run together in the same file.

What sits behind the choice is the tariff. Intentional killing under TCK 81 carries life imprisonment on its own, and the eleven qualified circumstances in TCK 82 — among them premeditation, a killing of a spouse, a parent or a child, and a killing committed to conceal another offence or to avoid capture — carry aggravated life imprisonment. Where the other person survived, the same account may have to answer a charge of attempted murder under TCK 35 or of intentional injury under TCK 86 and 87, a line drawn in our note on assault and public order offences. In every one of those forms, self-defence is reached only after the act is on the record.

Two rights are read out before your statement is taken, and the fact that they were read is written into the record. Under CMK 147/1-e you are told that making no statement about the offence alleged against you is your legal right. Under CMK 147/1-c you are told that you may choose a lawyer, that the lawyer may be present while your statement is taken, and that the bar will appoint one if you are not in a position to choose. Where the offence carries a lower limit above five years' imprisonment, counsel is appointed without you having to ask (CMK 150/3); a homicide file is in that class.

Silence is reversible. A recorded account is not, although the Code draws one line that matters. Under CMK 148/4, a statement taken by the police without a lawyer present cannot be made the basis of a judgment unless the suspect confirms it before a judge or a court. That line does not extend to a statement given with a lawyer present, and it does not delete a false denial from the file — it only bars an unconfirmed police statement from carrying the verdict. Under CMK 148/5, where a further statement on the same event becomes necessary, it may be taken only by the public prosecutor.

CMK 148/1 requires the statement to rest on free will, and CMK 148/3 makes anything obtained by prohibited methods — ill-treatment, exhaustion, deception, threat, an unlawful promise of advantage — unusable as evidence even if it was given with consent. That protects you against how you were questioned. It is not a route back from what you chose to say.

A truthful account of a violent moment does not always land inside TCK 25/1. The Code provides for the near misses, and they are not equivalent to one another.

The distance between the first two rows and the last one is the case. TCK 25/1 and TCK 27/2 end in no penalty at all. TCK 29 ends in a term of years, and where the starting point is life imprisonment that term is twelve to eighteen years — a six-year range the court moves within by weighing how grave the provoking act was against how you responded. None of those distinctions can be argued from a file that contains no account of the moment from you.

Self-defence is proved by what the moment left behind, and most of that is perishable. Under CMK 147/1-f a suspect is reminded that they may ask for concrete evidence to be collected in order to remove the suspicion, and must be given the opportunity to put forward the matters in their favour. That reminder is the mechanism for everything below, and it is worth using in the first hours rather than in the third month.

• Your own body. Bruising, defensive cuts to the hands and forearms, a fractured finger — these fade, and a medical report dated the day of the event carries weight that one dated three weeks later cannot. Where the authorities want an internal examination or a blood or biological sample from you, CMK 75/1 requires a decision of a judge or a court; a prosecutor may decide where delay is risky, but that decision goes to the judge within twenty-four hours, the judge rules within twenty-four hours, and a decision that is not approved is void, with the evidence obtained unusable.
• The scene, and whatever recorded it. Footage from a shop, a stairwell or a bus is routinely overwritten within days. A request has to name the location and the time window to be of any use.
• Language. If you cannot explain yourself in Turkish, an interpreter is appointed at the investigation stage by the judge or the prosecutor under CMK 202/3. A self-defence account is a sequence — who moved first, what was in whose hand, how many seconds passed — and a sequence is precisely what weak interpretation flattens.

The clock is short. 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, which may not itself exceed twelve hours; for offences committed collectively the prosecutor may extend custody by up to three days, one day at a time (CMK 91/3). What that first day should look like is set out in our note on the first twenty-four hours after an arrest in Türkiye.

Intentional killing under TCK 81, 82 and 83 is one of the catalogue offences listed in CMK 100/3: where there is strong suspicion supported by concrete evidence that such an offence was committed, a ground for detention may be presumed. A self-defence account does not displace that presumption at the arraignment, and it is a mistake to expect release simply because the account is a strong one. It does shape the file from which later applications are argued, which is why release is treated separately in our note on remand, judicial control and release.

The decision is narrow and it is yours, but it should be made with three things known: what the physical evidence already says, what the file records about the other person's conduct, and which of the four provisions above your account can realistically reach. A lawyer can see the first two before your statement is taken. You cannot. That is the reason to wait for counsel rather than to explain yourself at once — not because the account is weak, but because it only gets one first telling.

The charge itself, how the sentence is built, and what changes in a homicide file because you are not Turkish are set out on our main page on murder and attempted murder charges in Türkiye.