Drugs in a parcel addressed to you, and what taking delivery is treated as.

Article 21 of the Anti-Smuggling Law (Law no. 5607) does not create the technique. It routes it. Controlled delivery under that Law is carried out under Articles 10, 11 and 13 of Law no. 4208 of 13 November 1996, by the customs administration, the General Directorate of Security, the Gendarmerie General Command and the Coast Guard Command.

So the rules that matter are in the 1996 Law, and they are specific.

What has to be true before it starts

Article 10 sets conditions that must all be met:

• the smuggling activity is seriously organised;
• there is no other means of identifying the organisers, the financiers and the members of the network and of securing the evidence against them;
• surveillance can be maintained to the final destination of the goods or funds, without any gap;
• there is sufficient time to run the operation.

For goods or funds prepared in Türkiye and taken abroad or in transit, Article 10 adds further guarantees to be given by the requesting State.

Who decides, and where the case ends up

Under Article 11, the decision is taken by the Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor's Office. If the surveillance is jeopardised, or if continuing would risk the loss of evidence or the escape of the suspects, the operation is stopped immediately, without a further decision. Jurisdiction then belongs to the court of the place where the controlled delivery was terminated — which is why a parcel posted from another continent produces a prosecution in the Turkish city where the doorbell rang. The same article states that a controlled delivery does not remove the jurisdiction of the Turkish courts.

Article 13 leaves requests from foreign States concerning the controlled delivery of property derived from crime to the Ankara sulh ceza court.

The practical consequence is easy to miss. By the time the parcel is handed to anyone, the substance has already been found, recorded and reported. The arrest is the last step of a file that already exists.

TCK 188 is not a single offence with a single range. A parcel case usually sits in one of two places, and the distance between them is measured in decades.

A parcel that crossed a border can be framed either way, and the framing is contested. Read the conduct list in 188/3 again: purchasing, accepting and possessing are each listed separately, next to selling. That is the structural reason why "I never sold anything" does not, on its own, move a file out of the article.

The multipliers

• 188/4-a. Where the substance is heroin, cocaine, morphine, base morphine, synthetic cannabinoid and derivatives, synthetic cathinone and derivatives, synthetic opioid and derivatives, or amphetamine and derivatives, the penalty is increased by half. Which of these the powder or the paper actually is comes from the laboratory report, not from the seizure record.
• 188/5. Where the offence is committed by three or more persons together, the penalty is increased by half. Where it is committed within the activity of an organisation established to commit crime, the penalty is doubled. In parcel files the sender, an intermediary and the recipient are sometimes counted as three.
• 188/6. Substances whose production requires official permission, or whose sale depends on a doctor's prescription, and which produce a narcotic or stimulant effect, fall inside the same provisions — but here the penalty may be reduced by up to half.

Because the offence carries more than ten years, the case is heard by an ağır ceza court under Article 12 of Law no. 5235, not by a first-instance criminal court.

Three sentences are said in almost every one of these cases: I did not order it. I did not open it. I did not pay for it. Each of them describes something real, and none of them is the legal question on its own.

The legal question is intent. Under TCK 21/1 an offence requires intent, and intent means realising the elements set out in the legal definition knowingly and willingly. Under TCK 30/1, a person who does not know the material elements of the offence while carrying out the act has not acted with intent. That provision is the actual home of the defence that you did not know what was in the box.

But TCK 30 is not established by saying it. It is established, or not, from what the file shows: how the address came to be used, what was in the messages, what the tracking history looks like, whether you attended a delivery office and produced identification, what you said in your first statement before anyone had explained the charge to you.

TCK 21/2 sits beside it and is less comfortable. Where a person foresees that the elements of the offence may be realised and acts anyway, that is possible intent, and the base penalty is reduced by one third to one half. A finding of possible intent is a conviction, not an acquittal.

Where the substance was no longer in the parcel

In some operations the substance is removed or replaced before the delivery goes ahead. Whether that produces a completed offence or an attempt under TCK 35 — where the reduction is one quarter to three quarters — is argued from the facts recorded in the file. This page cannot tell you which of the two your file falls in. Nobody can, before reading it.

Postal items are not open to the police at will. CMK 129 sets out a procedure, and the procedure leaves documents behind.

• 129/1. Items held by any public or private postal service may be seized by a judge's decision, or, where delay would be prejudicial, by order of the public prosecutor.
• 129/2. As a rule the officers carrying out the seizure may not open the envelopes or packets. The items are sealed in the presence of the postal staff and delivered at once to the judge or prosecutor who gave the decision or order.
• 129/3. There is an exception, and drug cases are inside it. For a listed group of offences — including TCK 188 — the envelopes or packets may be opened by police officers on the prosecutor's instruction.
• 129/4. Unless there is a likelihood of harming the investigation or the prosecution, the measures taken are notified to those concerned.
• 129/5. Items that need not be opened, or that need not be kept, are returned to the person concerned immediately.

This is where the reading starts. Which decision authorised the seizure, on what date, given by whom. Whether the prosecutor's instruction under 129/3 is in the file or only referred to. Who was present when the packet was opened. Whether the item sent for analysis is identifiably the item recorded on seizure, by weight, packaging and reference number. Whether the delivery was terminated at the point Article 11 required.

Under CMK 100/1, remand requires concrete evidence indicating strong suspicion and a ground for remand, and it may not be ordered where it would be disproportionate to the importance of the case and the expected penalty.

TCK 188 then appears in the catalogue at CMK 100/3-a-9. Where there are strong grounds for suspicion based on concrete evidence that a catalogue offence has been committed, a ground for remand may be presumed. It is not automatic and the presumption is rebuttable, but it is the reason remand is the normal starting position in these files rather than the exception.

The alternative in the Code is judicial control under CMK 109. The obligations listed there include a ban on leaving the country (109/3-a), regular reporting to a designated authority, a security deposit, and a prohibition on leaving a residence or a defined area.

The outer limits

• In work falling to the ağır ceza court, remand during the investigation stage may not exceed one year (CMK 102/4).
• Overall, remand in ağır ceza work is at most two years, extendable with stated reasons, and the extensions together may not exceed three years (CMK 102/2).
• Extension decisions are taken after the views of the prosecutor, the suspect or accused, and defence counsel have been obtained (CMK 102/3).

These are ceilings, not forecasts. A parcel case with one defendant and a completed laboratory report can be shorter than one with several defendants abroad and outstanding letters of request.

The interpreter

Under CMK 202/1, where an accused person does not know Turkish well enough to express himself, the essential points of the accusation and the defence at the hearing are translated through an interpreter appointed by the court. Under 202/3 the same applies at the investigation stage, where the interpreter is appointed by the judge or the prosecutor. Under 202/4 the accused may also give oral defence, on the reading of the indictment and on the final opinion, in another language he says he can express himself in better — using an interpreter he chooses from the official list, at his own cost.

In a parcel case this matters more than usual, because the case is built on words: what a courier said at the door, what was in a message, what you understood the question to be when you were asked whether you were expecting a delivery. If a question is not understood, say so and ask that the fact be recorded. A recorded misunderstanding is useful a year later; an unrecorded one is not.

The consulate

You may ask that your consulate be notified of your detention. A consulate does not take part in the defence and does not pay for it. What it can usually do is confirm where you are held, pass a message to your family, and provide a list of lawyers. For a family abroad, that first confirmation is often the difference between instructing counsel this week and next month.

Leaving the country, and being made to leave it

Release does not mean departure. Where judicial control is ordered under CMK 109/3-a, the obligation is precisely a ban on leaving Türkiye, and it stays until it is lifted.

At the other end, TCK 59 provides that where a foreign national is sentenced to imprisonment, his situation is reported to the Ministry of the Interior immediately after a decision on execution under probation or conditional release, and in any event once the sentence has been served, so that deportation may be assessed. Under Article 54/1-a of Law no. 6458, a deportation decision is taken in respect of foreign nationals assessed as falling within TCK 59; Article 54/1-d covers those assessed as a threat to public order, public security or public health. The criminal case and the immigration consequence are separate proceedings with separate deadlines, and the second one does not wait to be discovered.

TCK 192 is often the first thing raised in a drug file, and in a controlled delivery it is usually the most misunderstood.

192/1 removes the penalty entirely for a participant in manufacture or trafficking who — before the official authorities have learned of it — informs the authorities of the other participants and of where the substances are kept or produced, where that information leads to their apprehension or to the substances being seized. In a controlled delivery, the authorities already knew. That door is normally closed before the doorbell rings, and this is the single most common false hope in these cases.

192/3 is the provision that is actually in play. Where the offence has already come to light, a person who voluntarily assists in uncovering the offence and in the apprehension of the perpetrator or the other participants has the penalty reduced by one quarter to one half, according to the nature of the assistance.