A notice from a Turkish customs office that a suspect shipment has been held starts a period of ten working days. What you do in those days decides whether the goods are destroyed, released or become the start of a criminal case. The rules are in Article 57 of the Customs Law No. 4458 and Articles 100 to 111 of the Customs Regulation. This guide follows them in the order they happen.

The detention notice

A customs office that finds goods matching an accepted application suspends clearance or detains the goods. On the first working day after that decision it notifies two parties: the right holder (or its representative in Türkiye) and the declarant or holder of the goods (Customs Regulation Arts. 102 and 104). The notice goes to the contact named in your application, normally by e-mail, and identifies the office, the declaration, the goods and the quantity. Customs shares the shipper’s and consignee’s details to the extent needed for you to act. That information may be used only for the detention procedure (Art. 106).

The statutory deadline runs from that notification.

  • Ten working days for ordinary goods and three working days for perishable goods (Art. 57/3). Fashion and leather goods are never perishable, and cosmetics and fragrance are treated as ordinary goods in practice.
  • Within that period the right holder must obtain a preliminary injunction (ihtiyati tedbir) from the competent court, or file a civil action and obtain an injunction, or complete a simplified destruction (below).
  • On a reasoned request, the customs office may grant up to ten more working days where there is a valid excuse (Art. 57/3; Regulation Art. 107). The extension is not available for perishable goods. We ask for it only when the sample is late or the court’s calendar makes the first deadline unreachable.

If nothing is filed in time, the goods are released under whatever customs procedure the declarant requested (Art. 57/3). The same shipment cannot be held again.

Two variations matter. If customs acted ex officio because you had no application on file, you first have three working days to file one (Ministry of Trade FAQ), and the ten-day period then follows. If the goods were seized in a smuggling operation and reached a customs liquidation office, that office consults the same database. Under a 2017 circular it gives the right holder the same ten working days (Gün + Partners).

Inspecting the goods and confirming the fake

The Regulation allows the right holder to inspect the detained goods and to take samples for examination, at the right holder’s cost (Art. 104). On the first two days the sequence is usually this.

  1. We visit the customs office or warehouse, photograph the goods, labels, packaging and any codes, and take a sample where the office allows it.
  2. The photographs go to the person named in your application the same day. A reply within 48 hours leaves time for every route described below, including destruction by consent.
  3. Your product team confirms the counterfeit in a short written statement. It says which marks appear on the goods, why the goods are not genuine (construction, labels, codes, packaging, origin), and that the brand neither made nor authorised them. Someone identifiable as authorised signs it, and it becomes an exhibit in whatever follows.

The statement should be specific. “Not our quality” does not persuade a judge. “The care label carries a code format we stopped using in 2023 and the stitching count is eleven per centimetre against our fourteen” does. Keep genuine comparison samples available for the court-appointed technical examiner (bilirkişi) who may be asked to report later.

Expect two questions from the office about costs. Laboratory or examination costs are the right holder’s (Art. 103), and storage during the detention is at the right holder’s risk and expense (Art. 109). For a few cartons this is a small sum. For a full container, storage mounts quickly, which is one reason to decide fast.

Destruction, injunction or criminal complaint

Three routes are open within the deadline, and two of them can run together.

Simplified destruction. Under Art. 57/6 and Regulation Art. 105, goods may be destroyed under customs control without a court finding of infringement. The right holder files, within the deadline, a written request stating that the goods are counterfeit and how they infringe. The owner of the goods consents in writing, or is notified and does not object within the period. Destruction is carried out under customs supervision, with a record, at the right holder’s expense. This is the route for most apparel and accessories shipments: an importer rarely wants to defend a container of fakes in court, and signing a consent form costs them nothing.

Court order. Where the importer refuses, or where the shipment is large enough to justify pursuing the people behind it, the right holder applies within the ten days for a preliminary injunction. The competent court is the Civil Court for Intellectual and Industrial Property Rights (Fikri ve Sınai Haklar Hukuk Mahkemesi). The Industrial Property Code No. 6769 expressly allows injunctions that seize goods “including at customs and in free zones” (Art. 159/2). The court usually asks for a security deposit, and an injunction obtained before the main action must be followed by a lawsuit within two weeks. Goods a court finds to be counterfeit are destroyed, or altered so that they cannot be restored, at the owner’s cost. Removing the labels is not enough (Regulation Art. 111).

Criminal complaint. A complaint to the Chief Public Prosecutor under Art. 30 of the Code can be filed alongside the injunction or instead of it. The offence covers producing, importing, selling or storing goods under an infringing mark and carries one to three years’ imprisonment and a judicial fine. The prosecutor can order seizure of the detained goods. The Code’s fast destruction procedure (Art. 163) allows seized goods that are costly to store to be destroyed after a technical report, with samples retained as evidence. The criminal route is slower to start, but it identifies the importer. Under Art. 30/7 a seller who discloses the source and helps seize the goods avoids punishment, which is sometimes the quickest way to the supplier.

We agree destruction where the importer cooperates and the quantity is small. We use the injunction where the shipment is large or the importer is known, and add the criminal complaint where the same importer has appeared before.

Small parcels and couriers

Most seizures are now small. In the OECD/EUIPO Mapping Global Trade in Fakes 2025 report, shipments of fewer than ten items made up 79% of customs seizures worldwide in 2020–21, up from 61% in 2017–19. The same report found that postal services had become the main distribution channel.

In Türkiye the same procedure applies to postal and express courier shipments as to containers, and the courier hubs at Istanbul Airport generate a growing share of notices. The differences are practical rather than legal.

  • The ten-working-day deadline is the same, but the value of the goods rarely justifies a court application. Simplified destruction, with consent obtained through the courier company, is the normal outcome.
  • The exclusion in Art. 57/5 applies. Travellers’ personal effects and non-commercial gifts within the duty-free allowance are outside the regime, so a single handbag in a suitcase is not detained on IP grounds.
  • Repeated small parcels to the same consignee are evidence of trade. We keep a log of consignees across notices; three parcels to the same address in a quarter is the basis for a criminal complaint against a reseller.
  • Decide in advance how you will handle low-value notices, and tell your representative. A standing instruction (for example, destroy by consent up to twenty items and refer anything above that or any repeat consignee) saves a week of e-mail on every case.

What to do next

Before the first notice arrives, agree three things internally: who confirms a fake and how fast, who approves costs, and which outcome you want by default for small, medium and large shipments. With those in place, most detentions close within the ten working days, and the shipments that need a court or a prosecutor get there in time. Our customs enforcement service handles the notice, the inspection and the filing within the deadline.