Police Took Your Passport: how a foreign national gets it back during a Turkish investigation

Nobody in the courthouse is holding a note that says the passport should go back this week. Under Article 123 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, property useful as a means of proof, or property that is the subject of confiscation, is taken into custody; where the person holding it does not hand it over willingly, it is formally seized. A passport reaches the evidence room in one of three ways: it was taken during the search of a flat, hotel room or person; it was retained when you were brought into the station; or the case itself turns on your movements, in which case the stamps, dates and visas are the evidence.

Article 131/1 is the way out. Where seized property is no longer needed for the investigation or the trial, or where it becomes clear it will not be confiscated, the public prosecutor, the judge or the court decides that it is to be given back — of their own motion or on application. Those last words carry the paragraph. A passport nobody asks about stays where it is until the judgment is final. A written application forces someone to decide, and under the same paragraph a decision refusing it can be challenged.

Two practical points follow. The application goes to the prosecutor's office running the investigation, not to the police station that took the document. And separately from Article 131, Article 127/4 allows the person whose property has been seized to ask a judge for a ruling at any time. You are not obliged to wait for the prosecutor to move first.

Two measures are constantly confused, and the confusion costs months.

• Seizure is an evidence measure under Articles 123 and 127. It concerns the document.
• A ban on leaving the country is a judicial control obligation under Article 109/3-a, imposed by a judge instead of remand where the grounds in Article 100 exist. It concerns you.

Read the list in Article 109/3 and one absence is striking. Where the obligation is not to drive, sub-paragraph (d) expressly requires the driving licence to be handed to the registry against a receipt; where it is not to carry a weapon, sub-paragraph (g) requires firearms to be handed to the evidence office against a receipt. For the exit ban in sub-paragraph (a) there is no equivalent instruction. The ban operates through the border system, not through possession of your document.

So these are two applications and two decisions. Recovering your passport does not lift an exit ban, and lifting the ban does not by itself release the passport from the evidence room. If a court order is the reason you cannot fly, the passport is not the first problem to solve; that measure is dealt with under travel bans during a criminal case.

An application that does not quote the file is easy to refuse. Two documents settle what you are actually asking for.

The seizure record. Article 121/1 entitles the person searched, on request, to a document confirming that the search was carried out under Articles 116 and 117, stating the nature of the alleged act, together with a register listing everything seized or taken into protective custody. Article 121/2 requires your own statements about ownership to be written into it. Article 5/3 of the Regulation on Criminal Property requires the record to give the type and quantity of each item, its distinguishing marks and features, its assessed value, from whom, where and how it was taken, the investigation file number, the officers' full names, and the place, date and hour.

The evidence receipt. Article 6/3 of the same Regulation requires a receipt to be issued for seized property. Its number, with the investigation number, is what any later application is built on.

Then check the timing. Where the seizure was carried out without a judge's decision, Article 127/3 requires it to be submitted for judicial approval within twenty-four hours, and the judge must announce a decision within forty-eight hours of the seizure; otherwise the seizure lapses of its own accord. If that approval is missing from the file, the document is being held without a basis and the argument you make is a different one.

Your lawyer can read all of it. Article 153/1 allows defence counsel to inspect the investigation file and take copies free of charge. Article 153/2 permits a judge to restrict that access, but only in investigations into a closed list of offences — among them drug manufacture and trade under Article 188 of the Penal Code, forming an organisation to commit crime under Article 220, offences against state security, and offences under the Anti-Smuggling Law no. 5607. Ask about the phone in the same letter: Article 134/2 permits a device to be seized so that encryption can be broken and copies taken, and requires it to be returned without delay once that is done, while Article 134/4 requires a copy of the backup to be handed to the suspect or counsel and recorded. Where relatives abroad are organising this while you are held, the receipt number and file number are what they need to pass on — the sequence is set out under acting for a relative in custody.

The letter to the prosecutor's office carries the investigation number, the evidence receipt number and two propositions. The first is that the document is no longer needed as a means of proof: the pages that matter — the biographical page, the stamps, the visas — can be certified and kept in the file, which is what Article 131/1 means by no longer needing to preserve the item itself. The second is that a passport issued by another state is neither an instrument nor a product of the alleged offence, and so falls outside confiscation, the other limb of the same paragraph.

If the answer is no, the refusal is challengeable under the last sentence of Article 131/1. Article 268/1 gives two weeks from the day you learn of the decision, filed with the authority that made it; under Article 268/2 that authority either corrects its own decision or sends the file on within three days at most. Where the decision came from a sulh ceza hâkimliği, Article 268/3-a routes the challenge to the next numbered judgeship.

There is a middle route worth naming in the same letter. Article 132/5 allows seized property to be handed to the suspect, the accused or another person for safekeeping, on condition that it is returned immediately when asked, and the release may be made conditional on security. For a document, that is often granted where an outright return is not.

Once return is ordered the mechanics are short. Article 16/1 of the Regulation requires the decision and the evidence receipt to reach the prosecutor's office within two days. Article 18/1-a requires handover against proof of identity and signature on a delivery record, to the owner, the legal representative or the attorney, and Article 18/1-b requires it to be done in the presence of the public prosecutor. Article 18/1-ç is written for your situation: where returned property belongs to a foreign national, on application it is given to that person or sent to the embassy or consulate of their state.

Delay is not merely inconvenient. Article 6/1 of Law no. 6458 requires a foreign national to present a passport or equivalent document on entering and leaving Türkiye; Article 21/2 makes a residence permit application conditional on holding a passport valid for at least sixty days longer than the permit sought; Article 23/1 issues the permit sixty days shorter than the passport. While the document sits in the evidence room you can neither lodge nor renew, and lapsed status is where a removal file begins. Article 141/1-j allows a claim against the State for material and non-material loss where property was seized without the conditions being met, or was not given back in time. How the seizure was authorised in the first place, and what can be argued about the search that produced it, is set out on the page on searches and seizure.