“Competent authority” is the Convention’s term for the body empowered to issue the certificate. The Convention does not name that body; each contracting state designates its own authorities and notifies them. In Türkiye the term confuses readers because more than one office is competent, and which one applies depends on the kind of document.
Article 6 leaves the choice to each state
Under Article 6 each contracting state designates, by reference to their official function, the authorities competent to issue the certificate, and notifies every change in that designation. The Hague Conference publishes the notifications on a page per state; that page, not a translation office or a general guide, is the reliable place to learn who apostilles in a given country. Because the designation is left to each state, the HCCH pages show a single central authority in one state and courts, notarial chambers or regional governments in another.
What Türkiye notified to the Hague Conference
The HCCH page for Türkiye lists two groups. For administrative documents: in the provinces the governor, the head official of the district and the chief secretary; in towns the head official of the district. In Turkish the first two are the vali and the kaymakam, working through the valilik and the kaymakamlık, the provincial and district governor’s offices; which Turkish post the “chief secretary” of the HCCH page corresponds to is not stated there, and no Turkish source read for this site pairs that English title with a Turkish one. Inside the provincial offices more officials sign than the HCCH page names. Interior Ministry Circular 2011/59 of 4 October 2011 records the Article 6 notification as the governor and, on the governor’s behalf, the deputy governor and the director of legal affairs, and in districts the district governor; it then allows the governor and the district governor to delegate the signature to the provincial director of correspondence (il yazı işleri müdürü), the director of the provincial administrative board, the head of the legal affairs branch and the section chiefs of those directorates, and in districts to the district director of correspondence and, where the post exists, the chief of legal affairs. For judicial documents: the presidencies of the judicial commissions (adli yargı adalet komisyonu başkanlığı) at the places where a high criminal court sits. The Ministry of Justice circular 68/1 draws the same line in domestic terms. Which document counts as administrative and which as judicial is set out on the document pages of this site.
Notarial acts after the 2024 amendment
Notarial acts form a third group. Article 199 of the Turkish Notaries Law assigns the apostille on a notarial act to the governor or district governor, and the amendment in force since 30 November 2024 removed the condition that the office be in the notary’s own province or district; any valilik or kaymakamlık may now certify it. Some district pages still describe the earlier rule; the text of the law prevails. A notarised translation belongs to this group, since the certificate is placed on the notary’s signature.
Two ministries and one intermediary in e-Apostil
In e-Apostil, the official Turkish electronic apostille system, the competent authority does not change: the Ministry of Justice applies the certificate to judicial documents and the Ministry of Interior to administrative ones. The HCCH implementation chart names these two ministries as the supervisory competent authorities for Türkiye. PTT, the national postal operator, acts as intermediary under article 22 of the Postal Services Law: it receives the application and delivers the file, and it issues no certificate. This site is not that system; applications are made by the holder from their own e-Devlet account.
Bodies that are not competent authorities
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is absent from Türkiye’s notification; its Certification Unit legalises documents bound for states outside the Convention. Notaries are not competent authorities either: the notary draws up or certifies the act, and the governor places the certificate. Translation offices, PTT branches and consulates are equally outside the list. A receiving office abroad checks who signed the certificate, and a stamp from a body outside the notification is not an apostille.