This note sets out how the application works, what has to be obtained from the court within ten working days of notification, and where the simplified destruction procedure fits.
Why the Border Is the Cheapest Place to Stop a Counterfeit
A counterfeit shipment is easiest to deal with while it is still one shipment. Once goods clear the border and disperse into wholesalers, marketplace sellers and a dozen small warehouses, every unit of enforcement spend buys less: separate defendants, separate evidence, separate proceedings.
Turkish law gives brand owners a border tool for exactly this situation. Article 57(1)(a) of the Customs Law No. 4458 (Gümrük Kanunu) provides that goods which infringe rights protected under intellectual and industrial property legislation are detained, or their customs formalities suspended, by the customs administration on the application of the right holder or its representative. The procedural machinery — how the file is opened, how goods are held, how they may be destroyed — sits in Articles 100 to 111 of the Customs Regulation (Gümrük Yönetmeliği). The Industrial Property Law No. 6769 (Sınai Mülkiyet Kanunu) enters at the court stage: Article 159(2)(b) expressly lists, among the interim measures available, seizure of infringing products wherever they are found, including customs areas and free zones.
Two limits are worth stating at the outset. Customs assesses suspicion, not infringement: an officer compares a consignment against what the right holder has told the system a genuine article looks like, and the question of infringement remains for a court. And the hold is short by design. The border buys a brand owner days, not months, and those days have to be spent in court rather than in internal approvals. Import and export compliance more broadly falls within our customs law practice, but the seizure itself is decided on industrial property grounds under our anti-counterfeiting and customs practice.
Two Things You Need in Place Before the Container Arrives
A right that is effective in Türkiye. The customs file is built on a registered right, most often a trademark (marka) registered with the Turkish Patent and Trademark Office (TÜRKPATENT), whether through a national filing or an international registration designating Türkiye. Registered designs, patents and utility models can support an application as well. A foreign registration on its own cannot. Where the portfolio is not yet in place, that is the first project, and it is set out in the guide to trademark registration for foreign owners.
A live customs application. The border does not watch a brand because the brand is well known. It watches because the right holder has filed the application form in Annex 13 of the Customs Regulation with the customs administration, electronically, under Article 103, and has kept it current. The same provision requires a right holder established abroad to act through a representative established in Türkiye, so local representation is a precondition rather than a preference. A workable file contains more than registration certificates: the full technical description, the type and form of counterfeiting and a contact person that Article 103(2) makes mandatory, and the details Article 103(4) asks for where known — the goods and packaging as they genuinely appear, the features that separate authentic articles from copies, shipping and packaging details, countries of manufacture and routes. The application is decided within thirty working days, is granted for a period that under Article 103(6) cannot exceed one year, and lapses if it is not renewed, so renewal belongs in the same diary as trademark renewals.
One further point of housekeeping. A registration left unused for five years is exposed to cancellation, and an importer whose container has just been stopped has every incentive to look for that weakness; the five-year non-use rule explains how the exposure arises. Portfolio maintenance and border enforcement are two halves of the same intellectual property and trademark litigation programme, not separate budgets.
The Stop: Notification and the Ten Working Days That Follow
When customs identifies a suspect consignment it suspends release and, under Article 104(2) of the Customs Regulation, notifies the right holder or its representative within the next working day, together with the declarant (beyan sahibi) or the holder of the goods. Under Article 57(3) of the Customs Law the right holder then has ten working days from that notification to produce an interim measure from the court, in practice a preliminary injunction (ihtiyati tedbir). If nothing is produced, the goods are processed under the customs regime the declarant requested and continue on their way. For perishable goods the period is three working days. Article 107(1) of the Regulation adds a step that is easy to overlook: the document showing that the action has been filed and the injunction obtained must be presented to the customs office within the same period; obtaining the order is not enough. The same provision also covers the case where the injunction is obtained from a court other than the competent court: the substantive action must then be filed before the competent court within ten days of the date of the injunction, and the document showing this must likewise be lodged with customs.
Four practical points decide most outcomes:
- The period runs in working days, but Turkish public holidays and religious holiday periods can consume most of a window. A notification arriving the day before a long bayram is a genuine emergency, not a routine instruction.
- The right holder is normally permitted to inspect the goods, photograph them and, within limits, take samples, so that the court petition rests on observation rather than assumption. What is learned this way belongs in the enforcement file, not in a commercial one.
- Verification comes before filing. Product codes, labels, authorised-distributor records and factory data should be checked first, because a genuine consignment stopped in error is a liability rather than a result.
- An extension exists in the statute, not merely in practice: Article 57(3) of the Customs Law allows customs, on the right holder’s request and where there is a justified excuse, to grant up to ten further working days. Article 107(2) of the Regulation states that the three-day period for perishable goods cannot be extended. The extension should be a reserve, not the plan.
Getting the Injunction: Which Court, and What It Requires
Jurisdiction lies with the civil courts for intellectual and industrial property rights (fikri ve sınai haklar hukuk mahkemesi), which exist as specialised courts in the largest cities; where they have not been established, designated civil courts of first instance hear these files. Interim relief is governed by Article 159 of Law No. 6769 read with the provisions on interim injunctions in the Code of Civil Procedure No. 6100 (Hukuk Muhakemeleri Kanunu).
The petition asks the court to keep the goods under seizure, to prohibit their release, and usually to bar their transfer or further movement. Three procedural traps recur:
- Security. Courts commonly condition an injunction on the applicant posting security (teminat) against loss if the measure proves unjustified. The amount is at the court’s discretion. Cash or a bank instrument has to be available quickly, often from abroad, inside the same ten-day window.
- Implementation. The applicant must request implementation of the injunction within one week of the decision; otherwise the order lapses of its own accord, even though it was obtained on time.
- The main action. Where the injunction was obtained before the substantive claim, the claim must follow within two weeks of the request for implementation, failing which the injunction again falls away.
Powers of attorney are the quiet cause of missed deadlines. A Turkish court file needs a power of attorney executed before a notary and, for documents originating abroad, apostilled and accompanied by sworn translation. Producing that document takes a foreign company days it no longer has once a container is already held, which is why it belongs in the pre-arrival file rather than the response.
Simplified Destruction: Ending the File Without a Judgment
Article 57(6) of the Customs Law provides that goods held at the border may be destroyed under customs control by way of simplified destruction (kolaylaştırılmış imha) without a court first ruling that they infringe, and Article 105 of the Customs Regulation sets out the procedure. Within the same ten working days from notification (three for perishable goods) the right holder must submit a petition setting out in detail the features that make the goods infringing, together with a written consent from the owner of the goods or an authorised declarant abandoning the goods to customs for destruction, and neither the owner nor the declarant must have objected within that period. The ten-day period can be extended by a further ten working days on a justified excuse. Destruction takes place under customs supervision and at the right holder’s responsibility, all costs are charged to the right holder, and customs takes samples at the time of destruction. Where the declarant, holder or owner objects, Article 105(4) sends the file down the court route of Article 107.
The trade-off is straightforward. Simplified destruction is quick and comparatively inexpensive, and it removes the goods permanently. It produces no judgment, no damages award and no record that deters the next shipment, and it depends entirely on the counterparty choosing not to fight. Where the importer objects, or where the brand owner wants a decision it can rely on against a repeat offender, the court route cannot be avoided.
Because consent may not arrive inside the statutory window, the prudent course is to prepare the injunction petition in parallel and stand it down only once destruction has actually been agreed. Articles 105(2) and 107(1) of the Regulation run on the same ten working days, so pursuing simplified destruction does not stop the injunction clock; the two tracks share one calendar.
Costs, Storage and the Risk of Being Wrong
Border enforcement is not free to the right holder. Article 103(10) of the Customs Regulation provides that the administrative costs of processing the application cannot be charged to the right holder, but that analysis and expert examination fees and overtime are; Article 103(11) requires the application to carry an electronic declaration accepting all costs of keeping the goods under customs supervision, and Article 105(3) charges the destruction itself to the right holder. On bulky consignments — furniture, textiles in volume — storage can become the dominant cost of the exercise, which is an argument for deciding quickly rather than letting a file drift while headquarters deliberates.
The downside risk is more serious than the cost. If the consignment turns out to be genuine, the importer may pursue the right holder for the loss caused by the detention, and the security posted for the injunction exists precisely to answer such a claim. Two situations account for most errors. The first is goods made by a licensee or contract manufacturer whose arrangements the brand owner’s own records do not reflect. The second is genuine goods bought abroad and imported without the brand owner’s involvement, which is not counterfeiting at all. Here the legislation is explicit. Article 57(5) of the Customs Law excludes from the border measure goods produced with the right holder’s consent that are merely subjected to a customs procedure without that consent. Article 152(1) of Law No. 6769 provides that once products have been put on the market by the right holder or with its consent, acts concerning those products fall outside the scope of the right (hakkın tükenmesi), and unlike the pre-2017 decree it contains no ‘in Türkiye’ limitation: exhaustion is international. What remains to the trademark owner is Article 152(2), the right to prevent commercial use of products that have been altered or impaired. Parallel imports are therefore a different case, with different evidence, different arguments and a different commercial calculation, and describing them as counterfeits in a court petition costs credibility that is hard to recover.
What Comes After the Hold: Civil Claim, Criminal Complaint, or Both
An injunction only preserves the position. The substantive claim under Article 149 of Law No. 6769 can seek a determination of infringement, its cessation and removal, destruction of the goods and of the means used to produce them, compensation, and publication of the judgment.
Counterfeiting a registered trademark is also a criminal offence under Article 30(1) of Law No. 6769, punishable by one to three years’ imprisonment and a judicial fine of up to twenty thousand days; under Article 30(6) investigation and prosecution depend on the complaint of the right holder, and Article 30(5) requires the mark to be registered in Türkiye. The criminal track brings investigative powers a civil claimant does not have, and Article 30(7), which spares a seller who discloses its source and thereby enables the producer to be identified and the goods seized, shows how that track can be used to reach the party behind the consignment. Which track to use, or whether to use both, depends on the objective: goods off the market, a judgment that can be shown to the next importer, or information about who stands behind the consignment.
Sometimes the stop reveals a different problem altogether: a local party holding a Turkish registration for the same or a similar sign and importing under cover of its own right. That changes the analysis, because the importer is no longer obviously an infringer. The response then runs through the registry rather than the port — opposition (itiraz) where the mark is still pending, on the grounds and within the deadlines that govern opposition proceedings, and cancellation where it is already registered, including the administrative route discussed in the note on the current administrative cancellation regime.
A Working Sequence, Not an Emergency Response
Before anything is stopped. Confirm that the Turkish registrations cover the goods actually shipped, including packaging and sub-brands. File or renew the customs application and calendar its expiry. Prepare the identification material an officer will actually use: photographs, security features, code structures, authorised factory list. Execute and apostille a power of attorney, and leave a scanned original with local counsel. Name one person reachable within a few hours, and a deputy.
Day of notification. Acknowledge, request inspection, and verify against distributor and production records the same day. Decide within two days whether the consignment is counterfeit, parallel-imported, or genuine.
The days that follow. Instruct the petition, arrange the security funds, and file well before the final working day, because security transfers and translations can each cost a day. Present the order and the proof of filing to the customs office, which Article 107(1) of the Regulation separately requires.
After the order. Request implementation within one week, file the substantive action within two weeks of that request, and inform customs so that the hold is maintained without a gap.
Or close it by agreement. Where the importer will consent, simplified destruction ends the matter sooner, and that choice is a commercial one made with the storage bill and the likelihood of repetition in view.
None of this functions well as a reaction. It functions as a standing programme, reviewed once a year alongside renewals, so that the ten working days are spent on the file rather than on assembling the paperwork that should already have existed.
