A military status certificate (askerlik durum belgesi) shows whether a Turkish man has completed, deferred or been exempted from compulsory military service. Employers, immigration offices and naturalisation authorities abroad ask for it in work permit, long-term residence and citizenship files, and Turkish men living abroad are asked for it by foreign institutions as well as by the Turkish consulate. The certificate can be downloaded from e-Devlet, the Turkish e-government portal, except by the groups named below, but the copy that will travel abroad takes a different road.
Why a military status certificate is administrative
The certificate is issued by the askerlik şubesi, the military recruitment office under the Turkish Ministry of National Defence; it comes from neither a court nor a notary. For the Apostille Convention it is an administrative document, and in Türkiye the apostille on administrative documents is issued by the vali or kaymakam, the provincial or district governor. The Hague Conference page for Türkiye names the governor, the district governor and the chief secretary as the authorities for administrative documents. The judicial commission at a high criminal court seat deals with the originals of judicial documents and has no part in this certificate.
The e-Devlet military certificate at the apostille counter
The e-Devlet printout carries a barcode and no handwritten signature. The service standard of the Ankara Governor’s Office asks for an administrative document drawn up in due form with a handwritten signature and seal; the Onikişubat District Governor’s Office writes that a printout of an e-signed document can be looked at for an apostille only once an official of the issuing institution has physically certified it with name, title, handwritten signature and seal. A barcode printout presented on its own is therefore not apostilled at the district governor’s office. Inside Türkiye the same printout has a wide use: the Ministry of National Defence writes that the barcoded certificate from e-Devlet can be presented in any procedure to public or private institutions, and the Turkish consulate in Jeddah states that it has the same legal nature as a certificate bearing the signature and seal of the authorities. That equivalence is written for Turkish institutions; it does not say that a foreign institution accepts the printout, and it gives the printout no handwritten signature for an apostille to attest.
A signed copy from the askerlik şubesi
The e-Devlet route is not open to everyone. The Ministry’s recruitment FAQ says that no certificate is issued through e-Devlet to a yoklama kaçağı (a man who did not report for the call-up examination), to a bakaya (a man who did not report for enlistment) or to a man serving under arms. The recruitment office issues the certificate itself: the same FAQ describes the askerlik şubesi giving a certificate for university enrolment, and the Turkish embassy in Tokyo lists the certificate as obtained from e-Devlet or from the recruitment office. For an apostille the copy has to carry a handwritten signature and seal. Whether a recruitment office certifies an e-Devlet printout by hand, and whether a separate form of the certificate exists for use abroad, was not found in any official source in this site’s survey, and none of the 25 categories of the Ministry’s recruitment FAQ mentions the apostille; the office should be telephoned beforehand to ask which copy it issues. For Turks living abroad, a military certificate obtained from the Turkish consulate is a separate case: a consular document is outside the apostille under the first article of the Convention, and it is described on the consular document page of this site.
The military certificate is off the e-Apostil list
e-Apostil, the official Turkish electronic apostille system, accepts applications for the criminal record extract, court judgments, the civil registry extract and the multilingual birth, marriage and death extracts; the documents it says are still in preparation are the residence certificate and the name equivalence certificate. The military status certificate appears on neither list. Should the system widen its scope, this page will be updated; the verification date at the foot of the page shows when the source was last read.
France’s administrative documents column and the military certificate
In the legalisation table of the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs, the administrative documents column of the row for Türkiye refers to footnote (9): documents relating to civil status, capacity and family situation are exempt from legalisation, documents tied directly to a commercial or customs operation need legalisation, and the remaining administrative documents need an apostille. A military status certificate is not a civil status document, so a French authority is expected to look for an apostille on it. The exemption shown in the civil status column of the same table does not extend to this certificate.
Terms like tecilli and muaf in the translation
The translation is made from the apostilled, hand-signed copy; the sources read here do not say whether the apostille is translated with it, so the receiving authority is asked. Terms such as tecilli (deferred), muaf (exempt), bedelli (service completed against payment) and terhis (discharged) may have no exact counterpart in the receiving country’s system; the translator renders the term and, where needed, adds a brief explanation, but writes no opinion on whether the person would be treated as exempt in the receiving country. The translation is then certified by a notary (the translator being a yeminli tercüman, a sworn translator whose oath is recorded at that notary). Whether that certification needs its own apostille is decided by the institution receiving the certificate, and if so any provincial or district governor’s office issues it.