Stalking and threat allegations in Türkiye, and the two files they open.

Turkish law now treats persistent following as an offence in its own right. TCK 123/A was inserted into the Penal Code by Law no. 7406 of 12 May 2022. Before that date the same conduct had to be forced into other articles, and often was not charged at all. Files opened since then are read against a text written specifically for this behaviour.

Israrlı takip — TCK 123/A

The first paragraph covers a person who, persistently, either follows another physically or attempts to make contact by using communication and telecommunication devices, information systems, or third persons, and thereby causes that person serious unease, or causes them to fear for their own safety or the safety of a relative. The penalty is six months to two years' imprisonment.

The second paragraph raises the range to one to three years in three situations:

• the offence is committed against a child, or against a spouse in respect of whom a separation decision has been given, or a divorced spouse;
• it causes the victim to change school, workplace or home, or to leave school or work;
• it is committed by a person already subject to a removal order, or to an order not to approach a home, school or workplace.

The third paragraph makes both investigation and prosecution dependent on a complaint.

Tehdit — TCK 106

Threat is a separate article and is frequently charged alongside. Threatening a person with an attack on their life, or on their bodily or sexual integrity, or that of a relative, carries six months to two years. Where the offence is committed against a woman, the same 2022 amendment provides that the lower limit cannot be less than nine months. A threat of large-scale damage to property, or of some other harm, is dealt with separately and more lightly: on complaint, two to six months' imprisonment or a judicial fine.

The second paragraph sets two to seven years where the threat is made with a weapon, by a person who has put themselves in a state of being unrecognisable, by unsigned letter or by special signs, by more than one person acting together, or by drawing on the intimidating power of a criminal organisation, real or assumed. Under the third paragraph, if killing, wounding or damage to property is actually committed for the purpose of the threat, those offences are punished separately.

The older article that still appears

TCK 123 punishes persistently telephoning a person, making noise, or engaging in other unlawful conduct, where the sole purpose is to disturb their peace and quiet. On complaint, the penalty is three months to one year. It sets a lower threshold than TCK 123/A, and files sometimes cite it in the alternative.

A charge under TCK 123/A is not made out by a single message, and not by content alone. The article has two limbs and the file has to satisfy both.

Persistence

The conduct must be persistent. What that means is a reading of the whole sequence — how many contacts, over what period, after what response. Contact through third persons counts, and so does contact from a new account or a new number. Being blocked and then reappearing on another channel is precisely what the article was written to capture.

Effect

The second limb is the effect on the person: serious unease, or fear for their own safety or that of someone close to them. This is where files most often turn, and it is not established simply by the complainant asserting it. What was said in reply, whether contact continued in both directions, and what the complainant did next all bear on it.

How repetition is counted

Where the same offence is committed against the same person at different times under a single decision to commit it, TCK 43 applies: one sentence is imposed and then increased by between one quarter and three quarters. It is not a separate count for every message. The same structure has a second consequence — under TCK 66/6, the limitation period for a chain of acts runs from the last one, not the first.

The complaint clock

Because TCK 123/A and TCK 123 are complaint offences, TCK 73 governs. The complaint must be made within six months of the day the person entitled to complain knew, or learned of, the act and the identity of the offender. Withdrawal of the complaint drops the case; withdrawal after the judgment has become final does not stop the sentence being carried out.

Limitation

Prosecution time limits follow the upper end of the range. For offences carrying no more than five years, TCK 66/1-e gives eight years. That covers TCK 123/A in both its paragraphs and the first paragraph of TCK 106. The aggravated form of threat in TCK 106/2, with an upper limit of seven years, falls into the fifteen-year band instead.

Alongside the criminal investigation, and usually faster than it, runs Law no. 6284. Its stated scope covers women, children and family members facing violence — and, expressly, persons who are victims of one-sided persistent following. There need be no marriage, no relationship and no shared household for it to reach you.

What the judge can order

Article 5 lists the preventive measures available against the person alleged to have caused the harm. Among them: not using words or conduct involving threat, insult, humiliation or belittling; immediate removal from a shared home; not approaching the protected person, their home, their school or their workplace; not approaching their relatives, witnesses or children; not damaging their personal or household belongings; and not disturbing them by means of communication devices or in any other manner. Lawfully held weapons are surrendered to the police. Medical examination or treatment can be ordered where relevant.

Under article 12 the court may use technical means to monitor compliance, but the same article forbids the listening to, watching or recording of a person's voice or images by that route.

The evidence threshold

Article 8/3 is the part people find hardest to accept. For a protective order in favour of the person seeking protection, no evidence or document that violence occurred is required. A preventive order against the other person is to be given without delay, and the article expressly forbids delaying it in a way that would frustrate the purpose of the Law. This is a protective mechanism, decided quickly and on limited material. It is not a finding that you did anything.

The first useful step is establishing what is actually recorded against you. TCK 123, TCK 123/A, TCK 106/1, TCK 106/2 and TCK 105 have different elements, different ranges and different procedural consequences, and a file is not always opened under the article the conduct fits. TCK 105 matters here in particular: where sexual harassment is committed by exploiting the ease provided by postal or electronic communication means, the penalty is increased by half, and where the victim has had to leave work, school or family because of it, the sentence cannot be less than one year.

The whole thread, not the extract

Complaints are usually filed with screenshots, and screenshots are selected. The work that changes files in this area is almost always chronological: the complete exchange, in order, showing who initiated each contact, what was answered, and at what point contact was actually asked to stop. Where a full export of the conversation exists on your own device, preserving it matters more than anything you might say about it.

Attribution

Accounts, numbers and devices have to be tied to a person. Shared handsets, recycled numbers, accounts opened in someone else's name and messages sent by a third party are not academic points. They decide files.

What this page cannot tell you

It cannot tell you whether your messages cross the line. Persistence and serious unease are assessed on the whole file, by a court reading a Turkish-language record of exchanges that may have taken place in another language altogether. Anyone who reads three screenshots and gives you an answer is guessing, and the guess is usually optimistic.

Three procedural points decide most of what happens in practice, and two of them run against intuition.

Mediation is closed for stalking

Complaint offences normally go to uzlaştırma — criminal mediation — before anything else. CMK 253/3 takes stalking out of it. That paragraph provides that even where investigation and prosecution depend on a complaint, mediation cannot be resorted to in offences against sexual integrity, in the offence of persistent following (article 123/A), and in insult. Threat under TCK 106/1 is treated differently: it is expressly listed as a mediation offence in CMK 253/1-b.

Remand is not available on every version of this charge

CMK 100/4 provides that remand in custody cannot be ordered where the upper limit of the prison sentence is not more than two years, other than for offences committed intentionally against bodily integrity. The basic form of stalking in TCK 123/A/1 and the first sentence of TCK 106/1 both have an upper limit of two years. The aggravated forms do not: TCK 123/A/2 reaches three years and TCK 106/2 reaches seven.

That is not the end of it. CMK 109/2 states that the judicial-control provisions may be applied even in cases where remand is prohibited. Judicial control includes a prohibition on leaving the country, a prohibition on going to specified places or areas, a duty to report at set intervals, and a security deposit. In practice this, and not remand, is what a foreign suspect in a stalking file encounters.

What a sentence can look like

Where a sentence of two years or less is imposed, CMK 231 allows the court to defer announcement of the judgment. It requires no previous conviction for an intentional offence, the court's satisfaction that the defendant will not offend again, and that the damage caused to the victim or to the public be fully made good by restitution, restoration or compensation. The supervision period that follows is five years. What that commits you to, and whether any of it can be completed from outside Türkiye, is a separate question dealt with on the deferral and suspension page.

Four things differ, and they compound each other.

Language

CMK 202 requires an interpreter where a defendant or victim cannot express themselves adequately in Turkish, and the same rule applies to suspects, victims and witnesses heard during the investigation stage, not only at trial. In a stalking file this matters more than usual, because the evidence is text. Messages written in English, or in a third language between two non-native speakers, reach the court as a Turkish translation. Tone, irony and idiom do not survive that journey intact. Asking for the translation to be checked, and having the request written into the record, is worth far more than arguing about it on appeal.

Your consulate

Where the person apprehended or taken into custody is a foreign national, CMK 95/2 requires that the consulate of the state of which they are a national be notified, unless they object to it in writing. This is a provision of the Code, not a favour to be requested.

Leaving the country

A 6284 order restricts where you may go inside Türkiye. It does not by itself stop you leaving. A travel ban is a different thing, imposed in the criminal file as judicial control under CMK 109/3-a, and it is the measure that most often keeps people here for months. It can be objected to, and an application can be made to have it lifted or varied. Both have their own timing.

Residence and deportation

This runs on a separate administrative track with separate deadlines. Article 54 of Law no. 6458 lists the grounds on which a deportation decision is taken; among them are being assessed as a threat to public order or public security, and having a residence permit cancelled. Separately, TCK 59 requires that where a foreign national is sentenced to imprisonment, their situation be reported immediately to the Ministry of the Interior for evaluation in connection with deportation, once execution under probation or conditional release is decided and in any event once the sentence has been served.

A complaint on its own is not a deportation ground. But the criminal file and the immigration file do not wait for one another, and handling only the first is the most common and most costly mistake foreign nationals make in this area.