Reciprocity in Turkey: Enforcing a Foreign Judgment

If you are trying to enforce a foreign court judgment in Türkiye, reciprocity (mütekabiliyet) is the first door, and it is the one that shuts most often. A Turkish court will not enforce your judgment unless the country that issued it would, in principle, enforce a Turkish one. If that condition fails, nothing else in your file saves the case. Clean paperwork, a final judgment, a solvent debtor with a flat in İstanbul: none of it matters.

The relief is that this condition attaches to enforcement (tenfiz) only. It is not required for recognition (tanıma). If what you need is for Türkiye to accept that your divorce, your custody order or your status judgment is real, the reciprocity question never arises at all. That one distinction usually decides whether your matter is a form-filling exercise or a fight.

What MÖHUK Article 54(a) actually requires

Article 54 sets out four conditions for enforcement. The first, subparagraph (a), is satisfied by any one of three routes:

• a treaty between Türkiye and the state where the judgment was given, resting on reciprocity;
• a provision in that state's own law that permits Turkish judgments to be enforced there;
• de facto practice, meaning that state's courts have in fact enforced Turkish judgments.

You do not need all three. You need one, proved to the satisfaction of the judge. Four points about how the test really operates matter more than the wording.

First, the foreign system does not have to mirror Türkiye's. It has to be roughly comparable. If the foreign court would retry the merits of a Turkish judgment before enforcing it, that is not reciprocity, because what comes out the other end is a fresh decision rather than the Turkish one.

Second, in federal countries the assessment is made against the state or province that gave the judgment, not the federation. A judgment from a Texas court and a judgment from a New York court are separate reciprocity questions.

Third, reciprocity must exist when the Turkish court decides. A treaty that entered into force after your foreign judgment was handed down still helps you.

Fourth, the judge examines this on the court's own motion. Unlike some of the other conditions, it is not a defence the other side has to raise. Silence from your opponent buys you nothing here.

Treaty reciprocity, and the trap in the word treaty

Türkiye has bilateral judicial cooperation treaties with a long list of states, concentrated in the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, Moldova, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Croatia, North Macedonia, Albania, Mongolia, China, Tunisia, Morocco, Kuwait and Iraq are among them. The list moves, and it should be checked in your case rather than taken from any article, including this one.

Here is the trap. A treaty titled "judicial assistance" or "legal cooperation" often covers only the service of documents, the taking of evidence and access to courts. Many say nothing at all about enforcing judgments. The Turkish judge reads the operative articles, not the title. We regularly see files where the client was told a treaty existed, and it did, but it did not carry a single word about enforcement.

Two more things people assume and should not. There is no European shortcut: the EU enforcement regime does not extend to Türkiye, so an EU judgment gets no automatic passage and stands or falls on the same Article 54 analysis as any other. And the 1954 Hague Convention on Civil Procedure, to which Türkiye is a party, makes only orders for costs and security enforceable across borders. It does not deliver your damages award.

Legal and de facto reciprocity: where the argument actually happens

Outside the treaty list, everything turns on the foreign state's own law and its actual practice.

Germany and Switzerland

These are the two calmest files we handle. German civil procedure recognises foreign judgments where reciprocity is guaranteed, German courts have enforced Turkish judgments, and Turkish courts treat the position as settled. The practical work in a German file is about service, finality and the debtor's assets, not about reciprocity, which is why the country-specific detail is set out separately in our guide on how to enforce a German judgment in Turkey. Switzerland arrives at the same place from the opposite direction: Swiss law does not impose a reciprocity requirement on incoming foreign judgments at all, and that absence is itself what satisfies the Turkish test.

England and Wales

An English court will enforce a final foreign money judgment through a fresh action treating the judgment as a debt, without reopening the merits. That has been enough for Turkish courts to accept de facto reciprocity for money judgments from England and Wales. Note the limit, because it is real: the English route is built for money. If what you hold is an order to deliver property, to perform an obligation or to do something other than pay a sum, the reciprocity argument is thinner and you should expect it to be contested. The UK-specific guide deals with the rest of the sequence.

The United States

There is no single American answer. Reciprocity is assessed against the state whose court gave the judgment, or, for a federal judgment, against the recognition law that would govern where it is enforced. A minority of states do demand it, and in those states your file is harder in both directions. What actually persuades a Turkish judge is not a treatise but evidence: the text of that state's recognition statute, and, where you can find one, a real example of a Turkish judgment given effect there.

Where you should expect a fight

The Netherlands has no exequatur route without a treaty. Dutch practice instead permits a new action in which the foreign judgment is normally given effect without re-examination of the merits. Whether that amounts to reciprocity for Turkish purposes has been argued both ways, and Turkish outcomes have not been uniform. Sweden and Denmark tie enforcement to statute or designation, and without one a Turkish judgment does not travel, which makes the finding genuinely hard to obtain. Austria conditions enforcement on reciprocity guaranteed by treaty or by ordinance, a narrower gate than clients expect. For Russia, do not assume anything: Russian law links enforcement to a treaty or federal statute, and Russian practice on bare reciprocity has been inconsistent. For the Gulf states, the answer turns on the specific instrument and on practice that has shifted in recent years, so it is a question to research in your matter, not to inherit from a blog.

The uncomfortable version: if your judgment comes from one of these places and is worth a modest sum, and the debtor's only Turkish asset is a car or a small bank balance, we will usually tell you not to file. The proportional court fee, the sworn translations, the expert stage and an appeal cycle will cost more than you recover, and reciprocity may still go against you at the end.

Recognition needs no reciprocity, and divorce is where you feel it

MÖHUK Article 58 says that a foreign judgment can be recognised in Türkiye on the conditions in Article 54, except subparagraph (a). Reciprocity is expressly excluded. Everything else still applies: the matter must not fall within Türkiye's exclusive jurisdiction, the judgment must not be manifestly contrary to Turkish public policy (kamu düzeni), and the losing party must have been properly summoned and given the chance to defend.

This is why a divorce from a country with no treaty and no established practice can still be entered on the Turkish civil register, while a commercial judgment from that same country goes nowhere. Recognition also carries a fixed court fee rather than a proportional one, and the effect of the recognised judgment runs from the date it became final abroad, not from the date of the Turkish decision. For remarriage, inheritance and the marital property timeline, that backdating matters. The mechanics are set out in our guide to the recognition of a foreign divorce in Turkey.

In a foreign divorce decree that also orders payment, the status half and the money half can end differently. The divorce is recognition and needs no reciprocity. The maintenance or property award is enforcement and needs it. Clients are regularly divorced in Turkish eyes and unable to collect a single lira of the same decree.

The registry route that skips court entirely

Article 27/A of Law No. 5490 on Population Services allows a foreign divorce, annulment or nullity decision to be entered directly at the civil registry (nüfus müdürlüğü) or at a Turkish consulate, without a court case. The conditions are strict. Both former spouses must apply together, in person or through an attorney holding a power of attorney that names this specific act, the foreign decision must be final, and it must come from the competent authority of that country. If your former spouse will not attend, this route is closed and you are back in the family court, which is one of several reasons a contested file belongs with a family and divorce lawyer from the start rather than after a refused application.

How reciprocity gets proved in the courtroom

The court examines the point itself, but in practice you carry the work. What lands:

1. The text of the foreign statute or treaty provision, translated by a sworn translator and, where required, apostilled or legalised.
2. An opinion on that state's law, from an academic or practitioner, addressing whether a Turkish judgment would be enforced without a review of the merits.
3. Evidence of an actual case in which a Turkish judgment was enforced in that country. This is the strongest item you can put in the file, and worth real effort to find.
4. A written enquiry through the Ministry of Justice, which the court can direct and which frequently decides the issue.

The case is heard under the simplified procedure, with your opponent served and given a hearing date. If enforcement is granted, MÖHUK Article 57 provides that the foreign judgment is executed like a judgment given by a Turkish court. Our recognition and enforcement practice handles this sequence end to end.

If reciprocity is not there, what is left

Three options, in descending order of usefulness. You can sue on the merits in Türkiye, treating the foreign judgment and its file as evidence rather than as a binding decision. This is slower and reopens everything, but it is not hopeless, particularly where the underlying documents are strong. You can enforce elsewhere, in any country where the debtor holds assets and where reciprocity is not an obstacle. And where the underlying relationship was commercial, look hard at whether an arbitration clause existed or could still be agreed, because an arbitral award travels on the 1958 New York Convention and does not face the Article 54(a) test at all, as explained in our guide on enforcing foreign arbitral awards in Turkey. For contracts still being drafted, that is the whole lesson of this article in one line: an arbitration clause today avoids the reciprocity problem entirely tomorrow.

Send us the foreign judgment with its finality certificate, the name of the exact court and, for a federal country, the state or province, plus the service records showing how the defendant was notified and anything you know about the debtor's assets in Türkiye. We will tell you which of the three reciprocity routes is available for that country, whether your matter is recognition, enforcement or both halves of the same decree, and where we think the file will fail. If we think it will fail, you will hear that first, before any fee is discussed.

This guide is general information on Turkish law, not legal advice on your own matter. Rules and practice change; check the position before you act.