Can Your Lawyer Read the Case File While You Are in Custody? What CMK 153 gives, and what a judge can close

Article 153 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CMK) is short, and it is the whole answer. Paragraph 1: during the investigation stage, defence counsel may examine the contents of the file and take a copy of the documents they ask for, free of any fee. There is no waiting period, no requirement that an indictment be filed first, and no discretion for the police to decide which parts are useful for you to see.

Two separate rules govern the paperwork. Article 46 of the Attorneys Act (Law no. 1136) allows any lawyer, or a trainee, to inspect case and enforcement files without a power of attorney, and states that meeting that request is mandatory for those holding the file. The same article withholds one thing from a lawyer who has not filed a vekâletname: copies and photocopies of the documents in it. A lawyer instructed by telephone at three in the morning can therefore read the file that night, and can take documents out of it once the appointment is papered.

Access to the file and access to you run on different tracks, and the second is the harder one to touch. CMK 149/3 provides that at every stage of the investigation and the prosecution, a lawyer's right to meet you, to be present while your statement is taken or you are questioned, and to give legal assistance may not be obstructed or restricted. CMK 154/1 adds that you may meet counsel at any time, with no power of attorney, in conditions where what is said cannot be overheard by others, and that your correspondence with counsel may not be placed under supervision.

One exception exists and it is narrow. Under CMK 154/2, for the offences defined in Book Two, Part Four, Chapters Four to Seven of the Turkish Criminal Code, for offences within the scope of the Anti-Terror Law, and for the manufacture and trafficking of narcotics committed within the activity of an organisation, a judge may — on the prosecutor's request — restrict a detained suspect's right to meet counsel for twenty-four hours; no statement may be taken during that period.

The exception is real, and it is narrow. Under CMK 153/2 counsel's power to examine the file or take copies may be restricted where it would endanger the purpose of the investigation. Three conditions apply at once, and each is checkable: the public prosecutor must request it, a judge must decide it, and the offence under investigation must appear on a closed statutory list. A prosecutor cannot impose the restriction alone, and it cannot lawfully be applied to an offence outside the list.

Everything outside that table is unaffected. A theft file, an assault file, an ordinary fraud file, a personal-use narcotics file under TCK 191 — none of them can carry a restriction under this provision, whatever is said at the counter. CMK 157 does make the procedural steps of an investigation secret, but it says so expressly on condition that the rights of the defence are not harmed. Secrecy toward the public is not the same decision as closing the file to your own lawyer, and the two are often confused in the telling.

Even where a restriction has been properly ordered, CMK 153/3 keeps three categories outside it: the record containing the statement of the apprehended person or the suspect; expert reports; and the records of any other judicial act the suspect was entitled to attend.

For a foreign national those three usually carry the case. Your own statement record is the document the prosecutor will hold you to, and if it was typed in Turkish and read back to you through an interpreter appointed under CMK 202/3, the version on the page may not be the version you gave — which is why the record has to be read against your account rather than assumed, as set out under interpreters and the language your case is run in. Expert reports include the forensic laboratory analysis in a narcotics file, which fixes both the substance and its net quantity; the charge and the sentencing band often turn on those two figures, and the report remains examinable even in a TCK 188 file that is otherwise closed. Records of acts you were entitled to attend include the search and seizure carried out in front of you.

So when you are told that the file is restricted, the useful question is not whether a restriction exists but what it is actually doing. In a TCK 188 file it withholds the surveillance material, the statements of co-suspects and the telephone records. It does not withhold the laboratory report, and it does not withhold your own words. Under CMK 153/5, the same rights belong to the lawyer representing the injured party.

Police custody is measured in hours. CMK 91/1 caps it at twenty-four hours from the moment of apprehension, excluding a maximum of twelve hours for transport to the nearest judge or court. For offences committed collectively, the prosecutor may extend it by written order, one day at a time, for up to three days (CMK 91/3). At the end of that period you are either released or brought before the sulh ceza judge for questioning, at which defence counsel is present (CMK 91/7).

Inside that window, what your lawyer has been able to read is what turns your statement from a guess into a decision. CMK 147/1-c requires that you be told, before the statement is taken, that you may choose counsel and benefit from that assistance, and that one will be assigned by the bar if you are not in a position to appoint your own. CMK 148/4 explains why insisting is worth it: a statement taken by the police without counsel present cannot be made the basis of a judgment unless you confirm it before a judge or a court.

A restriction is a judge's decision, and a judge's decision can be objected to. Under CMK 268/1 the objection is lodged within two weeks of the day the decision comes to your knowledge — the seven-day period that many older texts still quote was extended in March 2024 — and it goes first to the judge who made it, who may correct it, and otherwise passes within three days to the reviewing authority, which for a sulh ceza restriction is the sulh ceza judgeship next in number (CMK 268/3-a). Restrictions also fall away on their own. CMK 153/4 gives counsel access to the file contents and to the evidence held, and free copies of everything in it, from the date the court accepts the indictment; under CMK 174 the court must rule on the indictment within fifteen days of receiving it, and an indictment not returned within that period is deemed accepted.

Reading the file is one step in a sequence that begins at the police station. What else has to happen in those hours is set out in the first twenty-four hours after an arrest in Türkiye; what comes immediately after, when the judge chooses between release, judicial control and remand, is covered under remand, judicial control and release. If you are reading this from another country for someone else, note that a relative has no right of access to the file at all — a family outside Türkiye learns what is in it only through instructed counsel.