"Basit tıbbi müdahale" on your forensic report: what that one line decides

The full phrase on a Turkish forensic report (adli rapor) records that the effect of the injury on the person is slight, to the extent that it can be remedied by a simple medical intervention — basit bir tıbbî müdahaleyle giderilebilecek ölçüde hafif. Nothing else on that form carries the same weight.

It is not a finding about who started the fight or whether you acted in self-defence; those belong to the file, not to the doctor. Nor does it say the injury was imagined. It is a statement about treatment: a wound that needs cleaning and a dressing, a bruise, a nosebleed, a short course of painkillers. The doctor answers one narrow question — how much medical work does this take to put right.

The Penal Code attaches consequences to the answer. Under TCK 86/2, where the effect of intentional injury is slight in that sense, the offence is punished on the complaint of the victim with six months to one year and six months' imprisonment, or a judicial fine; where the victim is a woman the lower limit cannot fall below nine months. Without that line the base paragraph applies instead: TCK 86/1, one year and six months to three years, prosecuted whether or not anyone complains.

Forensic examination in injury cases follows a fixed order, and the simple-intervention question is not the first one asked. It comes after the two findings that increase the sentence set under Article 86.

• Is there a condition endangering life (yaşamsal tehlike)? If so, TCK 87/1-d applies: the sentence set under Article 86 is increased one-fold and cannot be less than four years where the base is TCK 86/1.
• Is there a bone fracture or dislocation? If so, TCK 87/3 applies: the sentence determined under Article 86 is increased by up to half, graded by the effect of the fracture on the functions of life. It does not replace the base paragraph.
• Can the effect be remedied by a simple medical intervention? Yes gives TCK 86/2; no gives TCK 86/1. The question is still asked where a fracture is recorded: a nasal fracture that the report also calls remediable by simple medical intervention leaves the base at TCK 86/2, so the complaint requirement survives and TCK 87/3 only raises the sentence set under it.

This is why the report handed to you in the emergency department at three in the morning is often provisional. It records what was visible that night. A fracture that appears on imaging two days later, a scar that has not yet fixed, a weakening of hearing or vision that takes weeks to measure — each can move a file that opened under TCK 86/2 into Article 87. The consequences in TCK 87/1, such as permanent weakening of a sense or organ or a fixed scar on the face, are normally assessed at a second examination after a healing interval.

Prosecutors read the report before the statements, because it fixes the frame.

The complaint and its deadline. Under TCK 86/2 nothing can proceed unless the victim complains within six months (TCK 73/1), running from the day the complainant knew both the act and who committed it (TCK 73/2). Withdrawal terminates the case (TCK 73/4), and withdrawal in favour of one of several suspects extends to the others (TCK 73/5).

Whether mediation is compulsory. CMK 253/1-b-1 brings intentional injury under Article 86 into the mediation regime, expressly excluding its third paragraph, together with Article 88. A file under TCK 86/1 or 86/2 therefore goes to the mediation bureau before anything else happens; a TCK 86/3 file does not. You have seven days to answer, and silence counts as refusal — what acceptance and refusal each cost is set out in criminal mediation under CMK 253.

What outcome remains available. A judicial fine is on the face of TCK 86/2, and a sentence of two years or less can be made the subject of a deferred verdict under CMK 231/5, ending in the case being dropped if the five-year supervision period passes without a further intentional offence. The conditions, including full repair of the victim's loss, are set out in deferred verdicts and suspended sentences.

Whether you can be held. Do not read the line as protection against remand. CMK 100/4 bars detention where the offence carries only a judicial fine or an upper limit of no more than two years, but it carves out offences committed intentionally against bodily integrity, as Article 86 is. Detention then turns on CMK 100/1 and 100/2, and for a visitor with no registered address in Türkiye, flight risk is the ground that gets written down. Where the injury falls under TCK 86/3 (b), (e) or (f), under Article 87, or is intentional injury against a woman, CMK 100/3 allows a ground to be presumed. That is why the same one-line report reads very differently inside a domestic violence allegation: it sits in TCK 86/3, outside mediation, and inside the presumption.

A forensic report is an expert report, and the Code treats it as one. Two provisions do the work.

• CMK 67/5. Once the expert examination is complete, the prosecutor, the participant, the suspect or defendant and their lawyers are given time to request a fresh expert examination or to state objections. If the request is refused, a reasoned decision must be issued within three days.
• CMK 67/6. You may obtain a scientific opinion (uzman mütalaası) from an expert of your own choosing, to be weighed in the preparation of the report or directed at the report once it exists. No extra time is granted for this on its own, so it has to be commissioned in parallel, not afterwards.

A challenge to the simple-intervention line is rarely won by argument. It is won on documents: the triage note, the full hospital record rather than the one-page form, the imaging itself, and where the finding is genuinely contested, referral to the Council of Forensic Medicine. If you were injured too but left the police station without being examined, there is nothing to set against the other side's report; obtaining your own the same night is the step that most often changes the shape of a two-sided file.

The report is one document among several. How it sits alongside the statements, the camera footage and the second report, and what each paragraph of Articles 86 to 88 carries, is set out on assault charges in Türkiye.