I recently had the misfortune of finding out about the nonsense details of the Turkish population registration laws.  I am a citizen of Turkey but I have been residing in the U.S. for quite a long time.  I had heard about the transition to the “Address based population registration system” in the news; however, I did not pay much attention because I do not have an address in Turkey.  I found the hard way that this new “system” is nothing but the Big Brother.  The only difference is, this Big Brother is too lazy to watch you: it expects you to go to its door to report on yourself, and punishes you if it finds out that you have failed to report what it wants to know.

The US is going through its 2010 Census right now.  Census forms are mailed to every address and people are asked to fill them out and mail them back.  Once the “mailing” period is over, census workers will start knocking the doors.  I don’t have a general problem with the state trying to get information about its population.  Those census statistics become very important in determining services and allocations to different communities, determining representation (which is a pillar of democracy, isn’t it?).  There is one critical aspect of the US Census, which distinguishes it from this new Turkish system: it is voluntary!  US Census Bureau, local municipalities, local or identity based communities are advertising their “clientele” to participate in the census; they are trying to get the people BE in the statistics.  BUT, nobody is forced to participate and there is no fine or punishment for not participating or refusing to do so.

Let’s go back to the Turkish system and how I got fined myself.  I got married to another Turkish citizen residing in the US in 2009.  We had a dear friend get commissioned for the day, got our license, did our ceremony, put the documents in order and sent it to the county clerk -all fine, all legal, no complications.  I called the recorder’s office to find out when I could get a certified copy of the marriage license (which I needed to register my new legal name in other offices), they told me to check back in 6-8 weeks.  I have slowly been changing my name in different institutions (e.g. on credit cards).  I had it on my list that we should get our marriage registered with the Turkish Consulate, which also involves getting new national ID cards,  getting the (optional) “International Family Document”  and having the name changed in the passport.  Mind you, we did not need to authenticate our marriage; Turkey recognizes marriages by foreign local authorities as long as they conform with Turkish civil law.  All we needed to do was to let the consulate know that we had been married, so that we could continue with other paperwork (See note 1 below).  We were not in a rush, because we did not need our Turkish documents (national id cards or passports) until the summer.

We went to the consulate in person to get this out of the way -in person because we thought we were being smart.  Our friends had gotten their registration done by mail, but their national id cards were not returned, they were asked to come in person to get their new id cards.  So, we thought: If we have to go to the consulate anyway, we can just go now and get all these done in one visit to the consulate.  Little did we know!  To make the long (and nerve-wrecking) story short, we had to pay a fine because we didn’t register our marriage within 1 month of our marriage, we were not given any receipt whatsoever for the money we paid in cash, and it turns out that you cannot get the new id cards issued until the registration is completed (which -we were informed- takes 1.5-2 months).  We left the consulate in a fury, didn’t want to pay any more money for the “family document” (what the hell is it anyway?) and decided to wait until the registry is done and new id card is issued before I do anything about the passport.

Why the hell did we pay more than $20 in fines?  Why were we punished?  Turkish state is notorious for finding all kinds of ways to skim money off of its citizens.  I am familiar with the charge for exiting the country that each citizen except those who live/work abroad pay when they go abroad and I have recently read the (officially unconfirmed) news about the cost of the new Turkish passports (which makes them the most expensive in the world).  But a fine for not registering your marriage within 1 months???  I googled around a bit to find about this “administrative monetary fine” I paid.  Apparently it has its sources in the new Law on Population Services (No. 5490) (See the end of the post for the original law and the new law -unfortunately in Turkish, and a summary document on the new registration system in English).

According to the new population registration system, everybody residing in Turkey (including non-citizen aliens) have to be registered through the address they reside. Citizens living abroad are registered by city and country only.  If you move, you have to let the authorities know, or you pay more than $200 in fines.  If you give a wrong address, you pay a >$400 fine.  You have to register births, deaths, marriages and divorces, or you’ll be fined.  Don’t lose your id card, or forget to renew it before it expires, or you’ll be fined.  Apparently, since Jan. 2010 the consulates started to apply these administrative fines.  The state wants to know what’s going on, but it is too lazy to put together a system where these events can be tracked automatically.  Because it is lazy, it passes the responsibility on to the citizens, punishing them if they fail.

Take marriages:  In Turkey you cannot have a legal civil marriage performed by a religious leader (imam, rabbi, priest, etc.) or your friend who gets commissioned.  It has to be someone official (generally from the local municipality or from the consulate), there may be exceptions for captains.  Why can’t these state offices that handle the marriages pass the information on the population services department?  Why do the individuals have to inform this office themselves?  In our case, we had to let the consulate know about our marriage because of the necessary changes in the paperwork anyway.  Why can’t the consulate update our information in the records in Turkey?  It’s not that our marriage is illegal or that we are trying to hide it, we didn’t think it was urgently necessary to inform the Turkish state.

What’s the urgency, the rush?  I do not even live in Turkey but I need to inform the state about my marriage within a month?  I couldn’t even get the necessary marriage certificate within 1 month of my marriage!  One explanation is this: the state is trying to protect my rights.  It is trying to make sure that my husband doesn’t marry another woman in Turkey, or that I get what’s legally mine in case something happens to him or to our marriage, or that our children are born “within marriage.”  I can’t convince myself that this is the explanation.  I am legally married in the US and this marriage is also legal in Turkey.  I have all the rights of a married woman in both countries even if I don’t register my marriage in the consulate.  I believe that the “urgency” emanates from the patriarchal undertones of the Turkish family laws and civil law again (remember this older post on assisted fertility treatments?).

Turkish law wants women to “belong” to a man, period!  This man can be your father or your husband, but a woman is ultimately identified through a man.  She has to carry the last name of a man, her records are kept under the family records where the father or the husband is the “head” (This has recently changed on paper, but in practice the state still recognizes the “husband” as the head of the family).  When a woman marries, her records are “migrated” to the husband’s family records (or they can start a new record as a family independent of larger families).  The state simply wants to know which man is my “guardian” at any given time, that is the urgency!

How can I be sure?  Here is how:  When I gave the paperwork to the consulate agent and he asked for $43, I thought that this covered the International Family Document.  The amount on the e-consulate website was less than that, but just I thought they didn’t update the increase in the price.  They take cash and don’t give any receipt of any kind.  We wanted to get the paperwork for the renewal of our national id cards, because we didn’t want to go to the consulate in person again.  For me, the last name would change and the marital status box would be changed to show “married” rather than “single” (see Note 2).  For my husband, just the marital status would change.  The agent at the consulate gave me a form and asked 2 photos (and $4).  I was puzzled and asked whether this single form was for the changes for both of our id cards.  The agent says, “Oh, it’s OK, his card doesn’t need to be changed right away!”  So, his id card can continue to declare him as a single man, but I have to change my name to take a different/another last name and my id card needs to show the new name and the new marital status.  It is all about where I stand as a woman,  the state wants to know right away, in 30 days, tick tock tick tock.  Husbands’ status? Meeh!

I was quite upset that all this paperwork was about the woman, did not concern the man at all (although it is legally the responsibility of the man to register the marriage unless the husband is an alien).  Then I asked whether they’d be needing the photos the website asked us to bring for the family document.  The agent said that the application for the family document needed to be submitted separately, did I want to fill the form and pay the fee now?  I was puzzled further, because I thought I’d already paid for it.  Then, he told me that I’d paid the fine (and postage).  I was furious, I said I didn’t need any family document (I was done certifying our new little family with the Turkish state) and left.

Needless to say, the e-consulate website did not say anything about administrative fees under sections about marriage registration.  The only place where it states that you need to register a marriage within 30 days is under the section for applying to get married in the consulate (which is not a section those who already got married by local authorities like us would look). The state expects you to know the details of the population law and the related fines even if you live abroad, and it doesn’t bother telling you about your responsibilities or fines on the websites you’d use (like the consulate website).  Later, when I read about the administrative fees, I learned that any official who is charging these fees should declare that the citizen has to pay a fine for so and so wrongdoing (think speeding ticket).  And you would expect that there would be a written record, at least a receipt showing that this money (in cash) has been paid.  Nada!  I wouldn’t even know that what I’d paid was a fine if I didn’t ask about the photo!  It’s a shame that a major Turkish Consulate is doing such shady business.  I wish I could fine the state and its agents for not doing their part in informing me when they should!

I am disappointed with the state of Turkey again.  As a woman, I am disappointed that the state sees me as a property whose owner should be correctly recorded immediately.  As a citizen, I am disappointed that the state is forcibly extracting information from us rather than developing its own efficient and reliable information systems.  As a Turkish national, I am offended and disappointed that the state is using fines and punishments to get compliance and doesn’t show any effort in developing ways of getting individuals’ voluntary compliance and cooperation.  As a Turkish passport holder, I am disappointed that the treatment I get at the Turkish consulates each time makes me glad that I am not living in Turkey where I’d constantly have to endure this kind of treatment, get robbed, and have no feasible way of placing a complaint (let alone an official recourse).

I’ll just leave you with my disappointment…

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Note 1.  Most of the paperwork is necessary because I had to change my last name.  In the US, I could legally keep my last name as it was, but I didn’t because I wanted my US and Turkish legal names to be consistent.  By Turkish laws, the default is that the woman gets the husband’s last name.  A woman can submit a petition at the time of marriage (or in our case, registration of marriage) which states that she wants to keep her last name, which will then be added before the husband’s.  There have been a few cases where women took this issue to court (all the way to the ECHR) and succeeded in going back to their original name, without the husband’s last name.  That a woman has to take the husband’s last name and that her registry is carried over to be placed under her husband’s family registry after marriage are indicators that the Turkish civil law is really insistent on putting the woman under the guardianship of a man and on making sure it is clear which man (father or husband) the “guardian on paper” is at any given time.

Note 2.  The national id card is outdated by today’s standards of “equality”.  I’ve mentioned previously how it is blue for men and pink for women (because anything other than this is not OK by the state).  It has a box indicating your marital status and another one indicating your religion.  The religion box is filled by civil servants automatically as “Islam,” in most cases you have to go through a struggle to have it left blank or have them write something else.  I recently read that the ECHR declared this box a violation of religious freedom (in a case where an Alevi wanted to have “Alevi” rather than “Islam” in the box.  The court said the box should be eliminated altogether).

Original (Law no 1587 dated 1972)

Amendments (Law no 4826 dated 2003)

New Law on Population Services (Law no 5490 dated April 2006)  pdf or html

Regulation on the application of the Law on Population Services (dated September 2006)

A document in English explaining the Address based Population Registration System