A clause in a Turkish supply or distribution agreement that caps the manufacturer’s or the importer’s liability for damage caused by the product does not work. Article 6/4 of Product Safety and Technical Regulations Law No. 7223 states that the relevant articles of contracts which relieve the manufacturer or importer of compensation liability arising from the product, or which reduce that liability, are void. Neither a monetary ceiling, nor an exclusion of consequential loss, nor a clause making liability conditional on notice within a fixed window survives that sentence where the claim is for damage the product caused. What does survive is the rest of the contract: invalidity attaches to the clause, not to the bargain.
The second half of the picture is quieter but decides more cases. Article 6/2 places two things — and only two — on the injured party: the damage suffered, and the causal link between the non-conformity and the damage. Fault appears nowhere in Article 6. That combination, a mandatory liability rule that cannot be contracted around and a proof rule that never mentions negligence, is what makes product exposure in Türkiye a matter to be priced and insured rather than drafted away.
The Provision That Voids a Product Liability Limitation Clause
Law No. 7223 was adopted on 5 March 2020, published in the Official Gazette of 12 March 2020 (No. 31066), and by its Article 26 entered into force one year after publication — on 12 March 2021. Article 25 repealed the earlier Law No. 4703 on the Preparation and Implementation of Technical Legislation on Products and provides that references in legislation to Law No. 4703 are deemed made to Law No. 7223. The secondary technical regulations issued under the old statute were not swept away with it: Provisional Article 1 keeps them in force, so far as they are not contrary to the new Law, until the implementing instruments under Article 24 are put in place.
Article 6, headed “product liability compensation,” is short enough to read in full and repays doing so. Paragraph 1 makes the manufacturer or the importer liable to make good the damage where the product causes damage to a person or to property. Paragraph 3 makes several manufacturers or importers jointly and severally liable. Paragraph 4 is the anti-avoidance rule. Paragraph 5 sends the assessment of pecuniary and non-pecuniary damages to the Turkish Code of Obligations No. 6098. Paragraph 6 sets the limitation periods. Paragraph 7 reserves the compensation provisions of other statutes.
Two features of Article 6/4 are usually missed. The first is its reach. The provision does not say “in contracts with the injured person,” and it does not distinguish consumer contracts from commercial ones. On its face it addresses any contract whose effect is to relieve or reduce the manufacturer’s or importer’s product-damage liability — which is exactly what a liability cap in a business-to-business framework agreement does. The second is its remedy. The statute voids “the relevant articles” of such contracts, not the contracts. That aligns with Article 27/2 of Law No. 6098, under which the invalidity of part of a contract’s terms does not affect the validity of the others — followed immediately by the qualification that where it is clear the contract would not have been made without those terms, the whole contract is void. In a long-term supply agreement it will rarely be clear that the parties would have walked away over the cap, so the ordinary outcome is a contract that continues to run with a hole where the limitation used to be.
Why the Usual Contractual Escape Routes Are Closed
Practitioners reaching for the familiar contract-law toolkit find that it points the other way. The comparison below sets out how a clause fares depending on which regime is actually engaged.
| Clause | Governing provision | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Cap on liability for damage caused by the product | Law No. 7223, Art. 6/4 | Void — the clause is struck; the contract survives |
| Advance exclusion of liability for the debtor's own gross fault | Law No. 6098, Art. 115/1 | Absolutely void |
| Advance exclusion of liability for slight fault, general commercial setting | Law No. 6098, Art. 115 | Not prohibited as such — the bar applies to gross fault, employment contracts, and licensed professions |
| Exclusion of liability for acts of auxiliary persons | Law No. 6098, Art. 116/2 | May be removed wholly or partly in advance — except in licensed professions (Art. 116/3) |
| Cap sitting in a standard form the counterparty did not negotiate | Law No. 6098, Arts. 21, 23, 25 | Deemed unwritten if not properly disclosed; read against the drafter; content review under Art. 25 |
| Unfair term in a consumer contract | Law No. 6502, Art. 5/2 | Absolutely void; remaining terms stay valid |
The middle rows are the instructive ones. Article 116/2 of Law No. 6098 permits the parties to remove, wholly or in part, liability for the acts of auxiliary persons — a genuine freedom, and one many contracts rely on. Article 6/4 of Law No. 7223 grants no equivalent freedom. Where the loss is damage caused by a product, the special rule takes the clause out of the reach of general contract autonomy altogether, which is why importing a limitation-of-liability template drafted for services into a goods contract is a recurring drafting error in commercial contracts governed by Turkish law.
Who Has to Prove What in a Product Liability Claim?
Article 6/2 requires the injured party to prove the damage and the causal link between the non-conformity and the damage. Read carefully, that allocation is generous to the claimant on one axis and demanding on another. Fault is not an element — no provision of Article 6 asks whether the manufacturer took reasonable care, and the assessment provision in Article 6/5 concerns the quantum of damages, not the standard of conduct. Causation, by contrast, is squarely on the claimant, and in a technical dispute it is causation that consumes the court-appointed expert (bilirkişi) evidence.
On the defence side, Article 5 supplies a presumption rather than an answer. Article 5/1 states that a product must be safe. Article 5/2 provides that a product complying with the health and safety provisions of its technical regulation is deemed safe until the contrary is proven. The closing words matter: conformity documentation, CE marking and test reports move the practical burden, but the presumption is rebuttable, and Article 5/3 sends products that fall outside any technical regulation to the general product safety legislation instead. An importer relying on a supplier’s declaration of conformity should also recall its own verification duty under Article 9/1(b), which requires it to confirm before placing the product on the market that the conformity marking is present, the required documents accompany the product, and the manufacturer has performed specified obligations. That verification duty is a compliance point at the border as much as a litigation point, and it sits alongside the classification and documentation checks described in our guide to importing goods into Türkiye.
Where the goods are sold to a consumer, a second and differently structured proof rule runs in parallel. Article 11/2 of Consumer Protection Law No. 6502 allows the rights to free repair and to replacement with a non-defective equivalent to be exercised against the producer or the importer as well as the seller, and makes the three jointly and severally liable for satisfying them — then adds that the producer or importer is not held liable if it proves that the defect arose after it placed the goods on the market. There the burden is reversed. Article 11/6 permits the consumer to claim damages under the Code of Obligations in addition to those remedies, and Article 6/7 of Law No. 7223 reserves other statutes’ compensation provisions, so the regimes stack rather than compete.
Is the Distributor Outside the Product Liability Regime?
A distribution agreement that carefully assigns product liability “to the manufacturer” can still leave the distributor as the defendant, because two provisions of Law No. 7223 attach manufacturer status by conduct rather than by contract.
Article 11/1 treats importers and distributors as manufacturers where they place the product on the market under their own name or trademark, or modify a product already on the market in a way that affects its conformity with the technical regulation or the general product safety legislation. Private-label supply therefore moves liability with the label, whatever the supply agreement says between the parties.
Article 11/3 is the trap that catches operators who keep poor records. Where the manufacturer, authorised representative or importer cannot be determined, a distributor which fails to notify the injured person — within ten working days of the request being served on it — of those operators’ names and contact details, or, if it does not hold them, of the preceding economic operator in the supply chain, is held liable for compensation as a manufacturer. The corresponding record-keeping duty is in Article 12: every economic operator must keep orderly records of the preceding and, where applicable, the following operator, retain them for at least ten years, and produce them at the competent authority’s request; paragraph 2 extends the same duty to those placing products on the market electronically and to intermediary service providers hosting third-party commerce. The distributor’s answer to an Article 11/3 request is only as good as its Article 12 file.
This is also where product risk meets the commercial architecture of the relationship. Because the exposure itself cannot be contracted down, the negotiation moves to indemnity, insurance and recourse — and to the exit terms, since a distributorship that ends badly can leave the parties arguing about stock in the field at the same time as they argue about a recall, a scenario examined in our note on ending a distributorship in Türkiye.
Product Liability Time Limits, and What Still Belongs in the Contract
Three limitation regimes may bear on the same set of facts, and they do not run together.
| Regime | From knowledge | Long-stop |
|---|---|---|
| Product liability compensation — Law No. 7223, Art. 6/6 | 3 years from learning of the damage and the person liable | 10 years from the date the damage arose |
| General tort — Law No. 6098, Art. 72 | 2 years from learning of the damage and the person liable | 10 years from the date of the act; a longer criminal period applies where the act is an offence |
| Defective goods, consumer sale — Law No. 6502, Art. 12 | 2 years from delivery (5 years for residential and holiday immovables), unless a statute or the parties’ own contract sets a longer period; the limitation rules do not apply at all where the defect was concealed by gross fault or fraud | |
What remains available to the draftsman is substantial, provided it is pointed in the right direction. A clause under which one party undertakes to reimburse the other for sums it has paid out does not relieve the manufacturer or importer of its liability to the injured person; it reallocates the loss afterwards, between parties who both remain exposed. Product liability and recall insurance does the same work commercially. There is also one direction in which contractual freedom still runs: Article 12/1 of Law No. 6502 fixes the two-year defective-goods period only where no statute and no term of the contract sets a longer one, so the parties may lengthen a liability period even though Article 6/4 stops them shortening the product-damage exposure. Specifications, incoming-inspection protocols, batch identification, storage and transport conditions under Article 9/1(f), and a defined recall procedure all reduce the probability of the event rather than the size of the liability — which, after Article 6/4, is the only lever the contract still controls. Read alongside the joint and several rule in Article 6/3, the sensible structure is one in which each operator in the chain knows what it must document, what it must insure, and from whom it can recover; the same discipline that governs risk allocation across the wider run of commercial law questions in Türkiye.
Administrative enforcement runs on its own track and is not a substitute for either. Article 20 sets bands of administrative fines for breaches of the operators’ duties, and the Law’s own footnote records that the figures in the text are the original nominal amounts, revalued for each calendar year by a Ministry of Trade communiqué published in the Official Gazette at the end of the preceding year. Any figure quoted from the statute without that communiqué is out of date; the current band should be read from the communiqué in force for the year in question.
