Holding Your Workers' Passports in Türkiye: when a wage dispute becomes a trafficking charge

Turkish law has no standalone offence of holding an employee's passport. What the document does is evidentiary: it is the fact used to argue that the worker was not free to leave, and that argument decides which of two very different articles the file is opened under.

Article 117/2 of the Penal Code punishes employing a person for no pay, or at a wage clearly disproportionate to the service provided, by exploiting their helplessness, isolation or dependence — and equally, subjecting such a person to working or accommodation conditions incompatible with human dignity. Six months to three years, or a judicial fine of not less than one hundred days. Article 117/3 applies the same penalty to procuring or moving a person in order to place them in that position.

Article 80 is human trafficking, and forced labour and servitude are the first two purposes it names.

Article 80 is built from three components, and all three have to be present:

• An act — procuring, abducting, transporting, transferring, harbouring, or bringing a person into or out of the country. Housing your workers in accommodation you control satisfies this without difficulty.
• A means — threat, pressure, force or violence; abuse of influence; deception; or obtaining consent by exploiting control over the person or their desperation. This is where the passport sits, alongside a recruitment "debt" that never clears, wages held back as a deposit, and a bed tied to attendance.
• A purpose — forced labour, servitude, prostitution, slavery, or the removal of organs.

Two statutory rules remove the defences employers reach for first. Under Article 80/2, once the acts constituting the offence are established, the victim's consent is void; a signed statement that the arrangement was voluntary does not answer the charge. Under Article 80/3, where the worker was under eighteen, no means element is required at all.

Where the means element is thin, files often settle on Article 109 instead — unlawful deprivation of liberty, one to five years, rising to two to seven where force, threat or deception was used, and doubled where two or more people acted together (TCK 109/3-b).

Article 80 sits on the remand catalogue in CMK 100/3 — migrant smuggling and human trafficking were added to it in December 2019. A judge may therefore treat a ground for remand as present on strong suspicion alone, without separately establishing flight risk. For an employer holding a residence permit rather than citizenship, that presumption is rarely argued away at the first hearing.

The timetable is short. Custody runs to a maximum of twenty-four hours from the moment of arrest, plus up to twelve hours for transport to the nearest judge; where the offence is treated as collectively committed, the prosecutor may extend it in writing by one day at a time, up to three further days (CMK 91). Your first statement, the workers' statements and the seizure of ledgers, phones and the passports themselves all happen inside that window. What that process looks like hour by hour is set out on the page on being arrested in Türkiye.

If remand follows, the ceiling in an ağır ceza file is two years, extendable with reasons by up to three more (CMK 102/2), with a separate one-year limit on the investigation stage (CMK 102/4). The alternative is judicial control under CMK 109/3 — a ban on leaving the country, reporting to a police station, a security deposit, house arrest. It is argued for, not offered; how that decision is made is worth understanding before the hearing rather than after it.

The moment a trafficking file opens, the people who worked for you acquire a procedural position of their own. Because Article 80 carries a lower limit of eight years — above the five-year threshold in CMK 234/1-a-3 and 234/1-b-5 — each of them may ask the bar association to assign a lawyer at no cost, at both the investigation and trial stages. Those lawyers are present when the statements that define the case are taken.

Separately, Article 48 of Law no. 6458 requires the governorate to issue a thirty-day residence permit to a foreigner where there is strong suspicion that they are or may be a trafficking victim, so that they can recover and decide whether to cooperate with the authorities. Under Article 49 that permit may be extended in periods of up to six months at a time, and may not exceed three years in total. The conditions attaching to other permit types are not applied. In practice this turns workers who were previously undocumented into witnesses with lawful status.

The administrative side arrives at the same time. Under Article 23 of Law no. 6735, employing a foreigner without a work permit draws a fine for each worker — six thousand lira in the figure enacted in 2016, uprated annually, and doubled on repetition — the workers are reported to the Ministry of Interior for removal, and the employer is made liable for their accommodation, return travel and, where needed, health costs.

The answer to a forced labour allegation is documentary, and most of it either exists already or does not:

• How wages moved. Dated bank transfers carry weight that cash and countersigned receipts do not. Three months of arrears reads very differently from a standing pattern of paying a fraction of the agreed wage.
• Registration. SGK enrolment, work permit applications filed or refused, contracts in a language the worker reads.
• How the documents were held. A passport in a drawer only you can open is not the same as one deposited at the worker's written request, in a safe with a signed logbook and a record of returns on demand.
• Freedom of movement. Gate records, rosters, whether anyone left and came back, whether pay was docked for those who did.
• How the workers arrived. If an intermediary brought them across a border for a fee, that conduct is a separate offence — see migrant smuggling under TCK 79 — and separating your position from that person's is often what keeps a file at Article 117 rather than Article 80.

None of this survives improvisation in the first statement. Denying that passports were held, when they sit in the seizure record, converts a defensible wage dispute into a credibility problem that follows the file to trial. How the trafficking charge is structured, and how victim identification runs alongside it, is set out on the human trafficking page.