The Three Years of Supervised Release: The Cut-Off Date That Decides Whether It Applies

Article 105/A allows the final part of a sentence to be executed outside prison, supervised by a denetimli serbestlik müdürlüğü. It runs up to the conditional release date — not to the end of the sentence. The standing conditions are cumulative:

• the prisoner is in an açık ceza infaz kurumu (open prison) or a children's education house;
• he is assessed as iyi hâlli;
• one year or less remains to the conditional release date;
• he asks for it. The article says talebi hâlinde. Nobody opens the file for him.

Since the amendment of 4 June 2025 there is one more: he must already have spent in prison at least one tenth of the period he has to serve up to the conditional release date, and in no case fewer than five days. Provisional article 11 keeps that condition off offences committed before the amendment came into force, which is why it does not reach the older files this note is about.

Article 105/A/3 contains a three-year figure of its own, and it is the one most often confused with the transitional rule. It is personal rather than chronological: two years for a woman with a child in the nought-to-six age group, and three years for a prisoner who cannot manage alone because of serious illness, disability or old age, on a report from the Adlî Tıp Kurumu or a full hospital board approved by it. A prisoner whose unpaid judicial fine was converted into imprisonment is outside article 105/A altogether (article 105/A/4).

Everything else called the three-year rule comes from two provisional articles of the same Law. Both are tied to the date the offence was committed — not the date of arrest, of the judgment, of finality, or of the application. This is the single fact that decides the question, and it is on the first page of the indictment.

Provisional article 10/6 does a second thing as well, and it is the part that gets overlooked. A prisoner still held in a closed prison for an offence inside that window, who has served one month where the total sentence is under ten years, or three months where it is ten years or more, and who is within three years of open-prison eligibility, may be moved to open prison. That matters because article 105/A is only open to prisoners who are already there.

Each transitional article carries its own exclusion list, and the two lists are not the same.

Provisional article 6 excludes intentional killing; intentional injury and injury aggravated by its result committed against an ascendant, a descendant, a spouse or a sibling, or against a person unable to defend themselves physically or mentally; aggravated injury by result under TCK 87/2-d; torture and eziyet; all offences against sexual inviolability; offences against private life; drug manufacture and trafficking under TCK 188; the state-security chapters; and offences within the Anti-Terror Law.

Provisional article 10/6 excludes a narrower group: certain aggravated killings, killings arising from building collapse in the earthquake, sexual offences under TCK 102, 103 and 104/2-3, the state-security chapters, terrorism offences, and offences committed within the activity of an organisation.

Read side by side, one practical consequence appears. A conviction under TCK 188 is named in the first list and not in the second. Where the offence was committed after 30 March 2020 but on or before 31 July 2023, the first door is closed and the second is not — and it is the second provision that has to be examined, with its own requirement of three months in open prison.

One further distinction is worth making, because the two articles are routinely spoken of as one. TCK 188 is manufacture and trafficking. A conviction under TCK 191, for use or possession, is a different article and is not what the exclusion names; and under article 105/A/5 a prisoner convicted under TCK 191 is additionally placed in treatment and rehabilitation programmes during the probation period.

The window is measured backwards from the conditional release date, and that date is not one half of the sentence in every file. Article 107/2 sets one half as the default. Article 108/9 puts convictions under TCK 188 on the recidivist schedule, at three quarters of a determinate sentence. The order is fixed: the sentence, then the fraction, then the conditional release date, then the deduction of one or three years — and only then a probation date. TCK 63 deducts every period of pre-judgment deprivation of liberty before any of it.

On a twelve-year sentence at one half, conditional release falls at six years served, and a three-year window puts the prisoner outside at three. On the same twelve years at three quarters it falls at nine, and the same window puts him outside at six. Same sentence, same provisional article, six years apart — because of the article number in the judgment.

None of it moves by itself. The request is the prisoner's, the evaluation report is the prison's, and the decision is taken by the infaz hâkimi on the papers. Under article 6 of Law no. 4675 that decision may be objected to within two weeks of service, before the ağır ceza mahkemesi in whose district the infaz hâkimliği sits. Service happens inside the prison, in Turkish. Families abroad usually hear of a refusal after the period has started running; what relatives can and cannot obtain is set out on the page for families of a detainee.

What it does not do for a foreign national

It does not shorten the sentence and it does not close the case. The probation period is executed inside Türkiye: reporting to a named directorate within five days of leaving prison, then remaining at a specified residence or district under supervision until the conditional release date. Leaving the country during it is not an option, and two further days without reporting bring in the escape provisions of TCK 292 and 293. Under TCK 59 the position of a foreign national granted probation-based execution or conditional release is notified immediately to the Ministry of the Interior, and article 54/1-a of Law no. 6458 provides that a deportation decision is taken for those assessed under that provision. Where the object is to serve the remainder at home rather than here, the route is a transfer under Law no. 6706, applied for separately and early — not a probation application.

Which fraction applies, how separate judgments are aggregated, and what an unspent disciplinary penalty does to all of it are set out on the parole and early release page.