Courthouse apostille for judicial documents

Türkiye designates more than one apostille authority, split by the kind of document. Judicial documents go to the judicial commission at the courthouse of the relevant judicial district.

⭐ Which documents take this route

• Court decisions, including divorce, custody and inheritance judgments
• Criminal record certificates
• Documents issued by prosecutors’ offices and enforcement offices
• Expert reports and other documents produced within proceedings

Administrative documents — registry extracts, diplomas, health documents, notarial papers — go to the governorship instead.

⚠ Files that need both

A divorce recognition file typically contains a court decision and a registry extract. Those are two authorities in two buildings, each with its own hours.

Sort your documents into the two groups before you set out. Discovering the second authority after queuing at the first is the single most common wasted journey in Turkish document work.

The finalisation annotation comes first

A court decision cannot usefully be certified until it shows that it has become final. That annotation is added by the court that issued it, and without it the apostille achieves nothing because no authority will act on a decision still open to appeal.

Ask for the annotation and the apostille in the same visit where the courthouse allows it.

Foreign court documents

The same split exists almost everywhere. A foreign divorce decree is apostilled by that country’s judicial authority, which is usually not the office that handles its civil records — see foreign divorce decree.

Translation order

Certify first, translate afterwards, and translate everything: the decision, the annotation, the seals, the register numbers and the apostille itself — see in which order documents are processed.

Electronic apostille

Judicial records are among the document types Türkiye can apostille electronically. Where the receiving authority accepts that form, the courthouse visit can be avoided altogether.

Documents from proceedings that are still running

Where a case has not concluded, there is no final decision and therefore no finalisation annotation. Interim documents can sometimes be certified, but what a foreign or Turkish authority will do with them is a legal question rather than a documentary one.

Ask your lawyer what the receiving institution actually needs before certifying anything from an open case. Certifying interim documents that turn out to be irrelevant is a cost with nothing to show for it.