One side has left Türkiye: the file closes without mediation

CMK 253 gives certain files a route that ends them rather than softening what follows. The sixth paragraph of the same article takes that route away in a single sentence, and it does so without anyone deciding anything.

The provision reads on its own terms. Where the victim, the injured party, the suspect or their legal representative cannot be reached — because they are not at the address declared to official authorities and recorded in the investigation file, because they are abroad, or for any other reason — the investigation is concluded without recourse to mediation.

Read what it does not say. It does not suspend the file. It does not require a finding that the offence is outside scope. It does not produce a decision you can object to, because no decision about mediation is taken at all. What happens in practice is an absence: no mediator appointed, no offer served, no seven days running, no report. The prosecutor completes the investigation and decides it on the merits — an indictment where the suspicion is sufficient to bring one.

The paragraph names four categories of person, and only one of them is you. The victim, the injured party, the suspect, and the legal representative of any of them each stand in the same position. If any one of them is unreachable, the investigation is concluded without mediation.

That is the part which catches foreign nationals from the wrong direction. A tourist who was assaulted files a complaint and flies home three days later. A visiting driver injured at a junction leaves at the end of a holiday. In each case the person willing to settle is present, cooperative and able to perform, and the route still closes — because the other side is the one who cannot be found.

A second provision narrows it further. Where an offence caused loss to more than one person, mediation can only proceed if all of them accept it (CMK 253/7). One unreachable complainant among several ends it for everyone.

So the question worth asking about your own file is not only whether you are reachable. It is whether the person on the other side of it still has a working address in Türkiye.

Being outside Türkiye is named in CMK 253/6, but it appears there as one illustration of a single condition: that the person cannot be reached. The statute elsewhere assumes that a party may be neither in the room nor in the country.

The mediator may put the offer by explanatory notification (açıklamalı tebligat) or through letters rogatory (CMK 253/4). The negotiations themselves may be attended by the suspect, the victim, the injured party, legal representatives, defence counsel and the victim's counsel (CMK 253/13) — counsel is expressly among them. Nothing in either provision requires your physical presence.

What decides the question is what the file contains on the day the prosecutor looks at it.

Distance is not the problem the provision is aimed at. An address that has lapsed is.

Nothing about a skipped file is neutral, because the outcome removed was the only one that ends the matter outright. Where a settlement is performed at once during the investigation, the prosecutor issues a decision not to prosecute (CMK 253/19). That decision is not a conviction, and only final convictions handed down by Turkish courts are entered in the judicial record, for citizens and foreign nationals alike (Law no. 5352, art. 4). An indictment is the start of the process that can produce an entry — see judicial record and archive record.

The measures in the file are unaffected either way. Making or accepting a mediation offer does not prevent evidence being collected or protective measures being applied (CMK 253/8), and a ban on leaving the country runs on its own track until a decision removes it — see travel ban during a criminal case.

One clock changes. From the first offer until the mediator files the report, the limitation period and the period for bringing the case do not run (CMK 253/21). Where no offer is ever made, that suspension never engages and time simply runs. It is the single respect in which the skipped file is not the worse one.

Two routes survive a file concluded under CMK 253/6, and both depend on someone becoming reachable.

Before the indictment. Even where an offer has been refused, the suspect and the victim may go to the prosecutor themselves with a document showing that they have settled, at the latest by the date the indictment is drawn up (CMK 253/16). The paragraph is written for a refusal rather than for a file that was never referred, but the deadline is the same one, and it is the earliest point at which a missing referral can be put back in front of the prosecutor who made it.

After the prosecution has begun. Where the court understands that the offence being tried falls within the scope of mediation, the case file is sent to the mediation bureau for the process to be carried out under the rules in CMK 253 (CMK 254/1). A file skipped under CMK 253/6 has a plain argument to make here: the bar on a second attempt applies where a mediation has ended without result (CMK 253/18), and a mediation that was never begun did not end in anything.

What both routes need is the thing that was missing — a current address for service, counsel on record, and a party on the other side who can be found. Where being reachable means returning to Türkiye, that is a separate question with its own procedure and its own risks; see coming back with an open case. On which offences are in scope, how the seven days run and what a settlement may consist of, see uzlaştırma in Türkiye.