Country of origin information report Turkey March 2007

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The problem of falsified documents
30.03 The Norwegian Country of Origin Information Centre ‘Report of fact-finding mission to Turkey (7-17 October 2004)’ noted that:
“The Norwegian Directorate of Immigration has repeatedly been presented so-called documents ‘proving’ that an asylum-seeker was wanted by the Turkish authorities. Some of these documents were – according to the applicant – issued either by the Gendarmerie/Police or by the Ministry of Justice. All lawyers I asked about this invalidated the possible authenticity of such documents. Neither law enforcement authorities nor any other Turkish official were entitled to issue such a confirmation. Neither detention-orders, nor warrants were handed out to the suspect or any other third person before the suspect was detained. Both Mr. Islambay and Mr. Demirtaş claimed, however, that it was widely known that such (and other) ‘documents’ could be attained through bribery. Tanrikulu and Demirtaş mentioned that two court ushers from the former State Security Court in Diyarbakir had been arrested in the summer of 2004 and had been charged with corruption for selling fake documents. Such cases could be found all over the country and the two officials from Diyarbakýr where only the tip of the iceberg. Demirtaş and Islambay further mentioned that the problem of corruption was widespread and that this also applied to lawyers. One person working at a lawyers’ office told me that they repeatedly had declined requests to produce fake documentary evidence, ‘sufficient’ for asylum applications. One lawyer stated that he had repeatedly rejected offers from Turkish citizens already staying in Western Europe, who offered him between 5,000 and 10,000 Euro for a complete ‘asylum-file’. The same lawyer told me that it was considered ‘easy’ to get fake documents in Turkey and assumed that ‘most of the documents presented to European Migration authorities are fake’.” [16] (p24-25)
30.04 The Norwegian report continued:
“One lawyer stressed that it might prove difficult and unreliable to judge documents only by the looks of it since different types of forms (or only letters) may be used at different prosecutors offices (e.g. Fezlekes). Only a lawyer could conduct a reliable verification, since he/she could compare the document’s contents (such as case-numbers) with the respective registries. Another lawyer told me that he had verified several documents for European Immigration authorities and that most of these documents had proved to be falsified. He had further noticed that most of these documents (some of them being ‘warrants’) referred to article 169 in the (old) Turkish Criminal Code. According to him, this article does not play an important role any more and it rarely leads to punishment: ‘You can send the persons with article 169 back to Turkey, nothing will happen to them’. However, persons who are wanted for activities sanctioned by articles 125 and 168 in the Penal Code might still face severe problems after return, according to Demirtaş. He stressed that some of these persons really might be in need of protection and he suggested that documentation on such cases should be carefully verified.” [16] (p25)