Asking a Turkish Court to Lift Your Travel Ban: timing, the review and what persuades a judge

CMK 111/1 is short. On the request of the suspect or the accused, and after the prosecutor's opinion has been taken, the judge or the court may decide within five days under CMK 110/2. Nothing in it obliges you to wait a month before asking, and nothing in it caps repeat applications.

That freedom is why the first application is so often spent for nothing. A judge who imposed the ban a week ago has already assessed flight risk on the material in front of him. An application filed the following week puts the same question to the same file, and the refusal then sits in the record as a considered rejection rather than an unasked question.

What changes the answer is a change in the file. Four moments do that more reliably than the passage of time.

• Evidence collection ends. Where the measure rests on interference with evidence rather than flight — CMK 100/2-b rather than 100/2-a — that ground weakens once devices are imaged, the expert report is filed and the witnesses have been heard.
• The indictment is accepted. The file leaves the sulh ceza judgeship for a trial court, which under CMK 110/3 applies CMK 109 and CMK 110/1-2 at any stage of the trial phase. A new decision-maker reads the case for the first time.
• A co-accused's position changes. Release of a co-defendant, or a lighter obligation imposed on someone in the same position as you, is a comparison the court has to answer.
• The charge narrows. If the offence moves outside ağır ceza jurisdiction, the outer limit in CMK 110/A drops from three years to two, and the proportionality of holding you here is open again.

CMK 110/4, added in 2021, requires a decision at intervals of no more than four months on whether the judicial-control obligation should continue. During the investigation the sulh ceza judge decides on the prosecutor's request; during the trial the court decides of its own motion. Both are directed to take CMK 109 into account.

In practice many of these reviews are disposed of on the papers, in a sentence, with nobody from the defence heard. That is a reason to plan around them, not to ignore them. Find the date of the decision that imposed or last continued the measure, count forward, and make sure a reasoned request is already in the file when the review comes round rather than arriving three weeks after it.

The objection and the application are not alternatives. Missing the two-week window in CMK 268/1 closes the first route and leaves the second entirely intact.

A travel ban is imposed under CMK 109 as an alternative to remand, and CMK 109/1 makes the link explicit: judicial control is available where the grounds for remand in CMK 100 exist. So the reasoning to be dismantled is remand reasoning. Under CMK 100/2-a a ground is treated as present where concrete facts raise the suspicion that you will flee, hide or abscond; under 100/2-b, where your conduct raises strong suspicion of destroying evidence or pressuring witnesses.

Petitions that recite hardship — a contract abroad, a sick parent, a wedding — engage neither ground. They explain why the measure hurts, not why it is no longer needed. The applications that move a court address the flight-risk finding on its own terms and then take away the reason for it, using obligations the same article already provides:

• Reporting, CMK 109/3-b: regular attendance at places and intervals the judge sets. It turns an abstract risk into a checkable weekly fact.
• Security, CMK 109/3-f: a deposit whose amount and payment schedule the judge fixes on the prosecutor's request, taking your financial position into account.
• Residence, CMK 109/3-k: an undertaking not to leave a defined settlement area — a narrower restriction that a court can grant as a step down rather than a release.

Understand the deposit before you offer one. CMK 113 states what it secures: first, your presence at every procedural step and at the execution of the judgment; then, in a fixed order, the participant's costs and the damage caused by the offence, public expenses, and fines. CMK 113/2 requires the decision to set out separately which parts it covers. Under CMK 115 the first part is returned to you if you complied, and the remainder is returned on a decision not to prosecute or on acquittal; otherwise, absent a valid excuse, it is recorded as revenue to the Treasury. It is not a fee, and it is not automatically lost.

There is leverage in the reasoning duty as well. CMK 101/1 requires a remand request to state the legal and factual reasons why judicial control would be insufficient, and CMK 101/2-d, added in 2021, requires the decision itself to show that insufficiency with concrete facts. Those provisions govern remand rather than a travel ban, but the discipline is what the defence asks the court to apply in reverse: if reporting and a deposit meet the concern, the file must say why they do not. It is the same argument that runs through remand, release and judicial control, and a foreign national is usually meeting it in both places at once.

CMK 111/1 gives the judge five days to decide once the prosecutor has been heard. It says nothing about when your petition reaches the prosecutor, or when that opinion is written. Applications are planned around dates weeks away. A petition filed nine days before a flight is a petition filed too late.

If what you need is one journey rather than the end of the measure, ask for that instead. CMK 110/2 allows the judge to exempt the person temporarily from complying with some of the obligations. That is the power used for a defined trip — dates, itinerary, a return date, and usually a security deposit under CMK 109/3-f standing behind it. A court unwilling to lift a ban will sometimes suspend it for eleven days.

Two things are worth doing after a favourable decision. Ask for it in writing, and confirm it has been entered in the records the border police read; a decision that exists only in the case file will not get you through passport control. And keep in view what the waiting never bought: CMK 109/6 provides that time spent under judicial control is not treated as a restriction of personal liberty and cannot be deducted from a sentence, and the travel-ban obligation is not among the two exceptions listed there.

If you are already outside Türkiye and the difficulty is attending rather than leaving, that is a separate question — see safe conduct for attending a Turkish hearing. If a conviction has been entered and the measure continues while the file goes up, the timetable belongs to the appeal rather than to CMK 111. For how the ban is imposed in the first place, who orders it, how long it may run and how it is recorded, the fuller account is on the travel ban in a Turkish criminal case page.