Export Controls and Sanctions Compliance in Türkiye: A Corporate Guide

A note on scope. This page is about corporate compliance: how a company classifies its goods, screens its counterparties, applies for permits, keeps records and answers an audit. It is not about defending an individual in criminal proceedings, and it does not assess the foreign or trade policy of any state. Where measures adopted under another country’s law are mentioned, they are treated as contractual and counterparty facts that a Turkish exporter has to manage, not as Turkish legal obligations.

Article 3 is where the restrictive powers sit. Subparagraph (b) allows restriction or prohibition of export on grounds of an unusual market development, insufficiency of the product, public security, public morals, human health, the protection of animals, plants or the environment, or the protection of objects of artistic, historical and archaeological value. Subparagraph (c) allows export to be made subject to permission or registration. Article 5 adds the goods listed in the annex to the Decision to the existing groups of prohibited and prior-permission goods, and the consolidated list itself lives in Communiqué İhracat: 96/31.

Article 6 of the Export Regulation, published in the Official Gazette of 6 June 2006, No. 26190, then states the operative rule in one sentence: where the export of goods is subject to the prior permission of a particular authority under an international agreement, statute, decree or other relevant legislation, the provisions of the export legislation are applied after the prior permission has been obtained from the relevant authorities. Everything practical follows from the ordering. The permit comes first; the export procedure comes second; and Article 17(1) of the same Regulation prevents goods from leaving on a declaration whose exporters’ association approval code cannot be verified.

Article 2 makes export of materials and technologies within the Wassenaar Arrangement Dual-Use Material and Technology List and the Australia Group Chemical Precursors List subject to the permission of the export authority, and requires the application to be filed with the İMMİB General Secretariat together with documents explaining the technical characteristics and fields of use of the material and an end-use certificate obtained from the importing company in the Annex A form. Article 3 has İMMİB perform a preliminary examination and forward the request to the Ministry, which forms its final assessment after taking the evaluations of the relevant public institutions and returns it to İMMİB for the request to be concluded.

Two deadlines then bracket the shipment. Article 4 allows ninety days from the date of permission to lodge the customs declaration, and the period is not extended. Article 5 requires the exporter, within fifteen days after export, to send a copy of that declaration back to the İMMİB General Secretariat. Files routinely satisfy the first and forget the second.

Article 6 decides most contested cases. Non-listed dual-use goods and technology outside both lists are still subject to permission in three situations: where export is to an end user suspected of developing weapons of mass destruction; where the exporting company itself declares a suspicion that all or part of the material could be so used; and where national and international security could be endangered and human rights violations could result. The second limb has an uncomfortable internal consequence: an engineer’s email raising a concern is not merely evidence of good faith, it is a trigger.

Article 7 is the boundary: the communiqué does not apply to materials that are the subject of transit trade or that are stored in free zones.

Law No. 5201 deserves a note of its own because its obligations are continuous rather than transactional. Article 4 has the Ministry of National Defence determine and publish the controlled list each January, or during the year where the need arises, after taking the views of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the ministry responsible for industry and trade and the General Staff; and it adds that where the list has not been determined and published for any reason, the last published list applies. Article 5 requires industrial undertakings within its scope to notify the Ministry of their founders, capital, shareholders, board and audit board members, the persons authorised to represent and bind the company, the types and annual quantities of the materials they will produce and their headcount, and any change in that information within one month of the change; production types and stocks each January; and the type and quantity of orders received, with the identity of those placing them, within one month. The paragraph that follows sets the counterweight: for orders outside national defence requirements the Ministry must notify its decision within one month, and if it does not, the order request is deemed accepted.

Law No. 5564 works differently again. Article 5(5) prohibits any transfer of Schedule 1 chemicals to or from a state that is not party to the Chemical Weapons Convention, permits transfer to a state party only for research, medical, pharmaceutical or protective purposes, and then closes the loop: the chemicals so transferred may not be re-transferred to a third state. Article 6(1) requires an import permit document and an export conformity document where the relevant legislation makes them compulsory, and Article 6(2) applies the same rule to movements between Türkiye and its free zones.

Article 3 makes the decisions self-executing in practice: freezing and prohibition decisions are applied without delay through a Presidential decision published in the Official Gazette, and Article 3(3) requires the final lists to be published without delay on the websites of the relevant public institutions. That is the screening source. Screening against a commercial database alone, without a dated record against the published lists, is difficult to defend later.

The duty that most exporters overlook is in Article 12(3) of Law No. 6415, applied here through Article 3(4) of Law No. 7262. A company that has a receivable from or a debt to a person whose assets have been frozen must report the amount and its basis to the Financial Crimes Investigation Board within thirty days of publication. An unpaid invoice from a listed buyer is exactly that. Article 12(5) adds a seven-day period for reporting assets held where execution of the decision has been requested from you, and Article 12(6) extends the freeze to any subsequent increase in the assets.

Consequences at company level are administrative as well as criminal. Article 5(7) of Law No. 7262 attaches an administrative fine to the legal person where the person who carried out the prohibited transaction or failed to give effect to a freezing decision is its organ or representative, or has undertaken duties within the company’s activities; Article 5(8) raises the ceiling where the act was for the benefit of a private-law legal person and provides that the fine may not be less than the amount of the transaction or act where that amount is established. The figures in both statutes are the nominal amounts as enacted; under Article 17(7) of Misdemeanours Law No. 5326 fixed administrative fines are increased at the start of each calendar year at the revaluation rate, while the same paragraph excludes proportionate fines from that mechanism; so the customs fines calculated on value are not revalued, and the current figure for a fixed fine is the revalued one for the year in question.

The audit itself is not confined to the border. Article 73(1) of the Customs Law allows the customs administration, after the goods have been released, to check the commercial documents and data relating to the export operations or to subsequent commercial transactions, at the declarant’s premises or at those of other persons commercially concerned. Article 13 requires the documents and information in Article 11 to be kept for customs control purposes for five years, running for export declarations from the end of the year in which the declaration was registered. A control programme therefore has to produce, five years later, the classification reasoning, the screening record, the end-use certificate and proof of the fifteen-day post-export report.

Two related exposures sit beside this one and are worth mapping at the same time. A company holding simplified status has more to lose than the fine, because a control finding feeds into the conditions behind the certificate; the routes of challenge are covered in our note on the suspension and revocation of authorised economic operator status. And where the controlled goods were imported under a conditional relief arrangement, a blocked or reversed export can also break the export commitment, with the consequences described in our note on closing an inward processing authorisation. The free zone side of the same file is set out in our guide to Türkiye’s free zones.

Classification has to be documented at the level of technical parameters, because the control lists referred to in Article 2 of Communiqué 2003/12 are parameter-based and a customs tariff heading does not resolve them. Screening has to be run against the lists published under Article 3(3) of Law No. 7262, recorded with a date, and repeated before shipment rather than only at onboarding, because a Presidential decision applies from the day it is published. End-use documentation has to be collected before the order is confirmed, both because Article 2 makes it a condition of the application and because the Annex A undertaking (that the item will be used for the stated purpose and will not be re-exported to a third country without the Turkish exporter’s permission) is the company’s own contractual protection. And the file has to hold the closing steps: the declaration lodged inside the ninety days, the copy returned within fifteen days, and, for import-side documents, the corresponding undertaking in the Communiqué on the Approval of Documents Relating to Dual-Use Materials and Technologies (İthalat: 2026/12), whose Articles 4(2) and 5(2) give import certificates and end-use certificates a six-month validity that cannot be extended, and whose Article 9(1) requires a permission letter from the exporting country before the goods can be shipped on to a third country. Article 10(2) adds a limit worth remembering: these documents do not replace an import permit and cannot serve as the basis for completing customs formalities.

The wider framework sits in our customs law and import and export practice notes. The specific question, whether a given item, destination and end user require permission before a booking is accepted, is answered from the technical file, not from the tariff code.