Türkiye

Türkiye's accessibility regime is built on a 2005 cornerstone statute — the Disability Act (Engelliler Hakkında Kanun, Kanun No. 5378) — sitting on top of explicit constitutional protections in Articles 10, 49, 50 and 61 of the 1982 Constitution. A second pillar arrived in 2016 with the establishment of the Human Rights and Equality Institution of Türkiye (Türkiye İnsan Hakları ve Eşitlik Kurumu, TİHEK) as the national equality body and the CRPD Article 33 independent monitoring mechanism. The Labour Law's quota (Article 30 of Law No. 4857) and the Personal Data Protection Law (No. 6698) backstop both pillars. Türkiye ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities on 28 September 2009; as an EU-accession candidate, the country is progressively aligning to the Web Accessibility Directive and the European Accessibility Act through the Türkiye Disability Strategy and Action Plan 2024–2028, but neither EU instrument is directly applicable.

The constitutional and treaty floor

Türkiye's 1982 Constitution gives persons with disabilities an unusually explicit floor. Article 10 ("Kanun önünde eşitlik" — equality before the law) was amended in 2010 to add a positive-measures clause that has been read by the Constitutional Court to require — not merely permit — measures favouring persons with disabilities, the elderly, and other groups requiring special protection. Article 49 sets the right to work; Article 50 establishes special working-conditions protections for those who need them. Most importantly for accessibility purposes, Article 61 places persons with disabilities under the express protection of the State: "Devlet, sakatların korunmalarını ve toplum hayatına intibaklarını sağlayıcı tedbirleri alır" — the State shall take measures to protect persons with disabilities and ensure their integration into community life. The Constitutional Court has treated Article 61 as a positive obligation rather than a programmatic statement, and it is cited routinely in administrative-court appeals of accessibility-compliance findings.

Türkiye signed the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities on 30 March 2007 and ratified it on 28 September 2009; the convention entered into force for Türkiye in October 2009. The Optional Protocol was ratified in 2015. Article 9 of the CRPD (accessibility) and Article 33 (national implementation and monitoring) are the international-law instruments most frequently cited in Turkish accessibility policy documents. The CRPD Committee's 2019 Concluding Observations on Türkiye's Initial Report flagged accessibility of the built environment and digital services, inclusive education, and recognition of Turkish Sign Language as priority areas — themes that the Türkiye Disability Strategy and Action Plan 2024–2028 explicitly answers.

Turkish Sign Language (Türk İşaret Dili, TİD) is recognised under Law No. 5378 and is the official sign language of the Turkish state. The Turkish Language Society (Türk Dil Kurumu) maintains the official TİD grammar and dictionary; public-service obligations to provide TİD interpretation now extend to courts, healthcare facilities, public broadcasting, and (under the 2024–2028 strategy) priority public-service portals.

The cornerstone statute: Law No. 5378

The Disability Act (Engelliler Hakkında Kanun, Kanun No. 5378), adopted on 1 July 2005 and substantially amended in 2014 and again in 2020, is the cornerstone of Turkish disability-rights law. It defines disability, sets out the rights of persons with disabilities across education, employment, health, social services and accessibility, and creates the institutional and supervisory machinery — including the provincial accessibility-monitoring and inspection commissions (erişilebilirlik izleme ve denetleme komisyonları) — that issues compliance findings and triggers administrative penalties.

The act's most ambitious provisions sit in its Provisional Article 3 (Geçici Madde 3), which originally gave public buildings, public-transport vehicles, public-transport stops and information-communication services seven years from 2005 to become accessible. The deadline was extended multiple times and now operates through a rolling penalty-and-grace framework administered by the provincial monitoring commissions. Three concrete obligation streams flow from Law No. 5378:

• Built environment. Public buildings — and a defined category of private buildings open to the public (banks, malls, hospitals, hotels above a certain size) — must conform to the Turkish accessibility standards published by the Turkish Standards Institution (Türk Standardları Enstitüsü, TSE), principally TS 9111 (accessibility of buildings) and the related TS series on urban infrastructure and transport.
• Transport. Public-transport vehicles, stops, terminals, and rail systems must meet the accessibility specifications published by the Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure; non-compliant vehicles cannot be entered into commercial service.
• Information and communication. Public-sector websites, e-Government services, public broadcasting, and certain private telecommunications services must be made accessible. The technical specification — although Law 5378 itself is technology-neutral — is delivered through the Presidential Digital Transformation Office's Kamu İnternet Siteleri Rehberi (KAMİS) guidance and the Turkish-language WCAG mapping that CBDDO publishes for the public sector.

The lead ministry for Law No. 5378 is the Ministry of Family and Social Services, specifically the General Directorate of Services for Persons with Disabilities and the Elderly (Engelli ve Yaşlı Hizmetleri Genel Müdürlüğü, EYHGM). EYHGM coordinates the National Disability Database, accredits accessibility-monitoring and inspection commissions in the 81 provinces, and operates the national disability strategy. Provincial monitoring commissions issue compliance findings; non-compliance triggers an administrative fine, plus a corrective-action timeline, plus — in the case of public-procurement-financed buildings — potential disqualification from future awards.

The equality and anti-discrimination pillar: TİHEK

The Human Rights and Equality Institution of Türkiye Act (Türkiye İnsan Hakları ve Eşitlik Kurumu Kanunu, Law No. 6701), adopted on 6 April 2016, established TİHEK as Türkiye's national equality body and national human-rights institution. The act prohibits direct and indirect discrimination, harassment, instructions to discriminate, and the failure to provide reasonable accommodation, across a closed list of protected grounds that explicitly includes disability (engellilik). TİHEK is the designated CRPD Article 33(2) independent monitoring mechanism and reports annually to Parliament on the implementation of the convention.

TİHEK has the authority to receive complaints (ex officio or on application), conduct investigations, hold hearings, mediate, and impose administrative sanctions. Its decisions are appealable to the administrative courts and ultimately to the Council of State (Danıştay). The institution's caseload now includes a steady stream of digital-accessibility complaints — inaccessible banking apps, inaccessible municipal-administration portals, inaccessible e-commerce checkouts — framed as disability discrimination under Law No. 6701. Reasoned decisions are published on TİHEK's website (with personal data redacted), and they form the de facto Turkish case law on what reasonable accommodation means in a digital-services context pending a fuller statutory accessibility code.

TİHEK administrative fines for discrimination violations under Law No. 6701 sit in a band that is revalued annually under the Tax Procedure Law's revaluation rate. For 2026 the per-violation range is approximately TRY 28,000 – TRY 420,000 for legal entities, with the upper end reserved for repeated or systemic violations. The 2024 monetary-band update was the largest single-year revaluation since the institution was created, reflecting the cumulative impact of the recent inflation cycle.

Employment: the quota under Labour Law Article 30

The Turkish disability-employment quota sits in Article 30 of the Labour Law (İş Kanunu, Law No. 4857). Private-sector employers with 50 or more employees at a single workplace must fill 3 % of those posts with persons with disabilities; the public-sector quota is set higher, at 4 %, under the Civil Servants Law (Law No. 657). The quota is calculated on the basis of the workplace headcount declared to the Social Security Institution (Sosyal Güvenlik Kurumu, SGK), and the matching of disabled jobseekers to quota vacancies is administered by the Turkish Employment Agency (Türkiye İş Kurumu, İŞKUR).

Failure to meet the quota triggers a monthly administrative fine per unfilled post, set annually by Ministry of Labour and Social Security communiqué and revalued each year. For 2026 the per-vacant-post monthly fine is approximately TRY 11,000+, with the figure published in the Official Gazette in late December each year. A 200-employee workplace that has filled four of its six required disability posts therefore carries a monthly penalty exposure of roughly TRY 22,000 (two unfilled posts × the per-post monthly fine) — an annual exposure that scales rapidly for larger workplaces and that is unusually visible because the SGK headcount data is reported each month. The collected fines flow into a dedicated fund that finances vocational rehabilitation, reasonable-accommodation grants to employers, and supported-employment programmes administered by EYHGM and İŞKUR.

Technical standards and the WAD/EAA alignment question

Türkiye is an EU-accession candidate — formally since the 1999 Helsinki European Council, with accession negotiations opened in 2005 and currently paused on most chapters. Neither the Web Accessibility Directive (Directive (EU) 2016/2102) nor the European Accessibility Act (Directive (EU) 2019/882) is directly applicable in Türkiye, but both feature explicitly in the Türkiye Disability Strategy and Action Plan 2024–2028 as alignment benchmarks. The strategy commits Türkiye to a phased harmonisation of public-sector website accessibility with the WAD framework (via CBDDO's KAMİS guidance and EN 301 549 / WCAG 2.1 AA mapping) and to a feasibility study on EAA-style obligations for private-sector products and services through 2027–28.

For the public-sector track, the operative document is the Presidential Digital Transformation Office's Kamu İnternet Siteleri Rehberi (KAMİS — Guide for Public Internet Sites), which sets the design, content, security and accessibility standards for all public-sector websites and mobile applications. KAMİS imports WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the substantive accessibility bar and references EN 301 549 v3.2.1 for ICT procurement specifications, but it operates as administrative guidance backed by a public-procurement compliance mechanism rather than as a stand-alone statutory enforcement track. Compliance is audited centrally by CBDDO and feeds into the central public-sector ICT procurement system; a public body whose website fails KAMİS conformance can find itself unable to renew its hosting or maintenance contract through the central framework.

For the built-environment and physical-accessibility track, the operative standards are the TS 9111 series (and the related TS standards on transport, urban infrastructure, signage and tactile paving) published by the Turkish Standards Institution. These standards are kept in line with the equivalent ISO and CEN standards and are used by the provincial accessibility-monitoring commissions as the technical bar against which Law No. 5378 compliance findings are made.

Data protection overlap: Law No. 6698 (KVKK)

The Personal Data Protection Law (Kişisel Verilerin Korunması Kanunu, Law No. 6698, in force since 2016 and substantially amended in 2024 to align with the EU GDPR) becomes relevant to accessibility wherever assistive-technology usage data, disability-status information or biometric authentication intersects with consent, special-category processing and transparency obligations. Disability-status data is a special category of personal data under Article 6 of the KVKK and may not be processed without explicit consent or one of the narrow non-consent legal bases. The data-protection authority (Kişisel Verileri Koruma Kurumu, KVKK) has issued guidance on the intersection with accessibility for accessible-authentication and assistive-technology-aware service design, and has cooperated with TİHEK on cases that combine discrimination and data-rights breaches.

Penalties — the five-layer exposure stack

As in most jurisdictions, a common error in compliance budgeting is to read the headline administrative-fine table in isolation and conclude that accessibility violations in Türkiye are cheap. They are not. The administrative-fine column is the floor of a five-layer exposure stack: (1) administrative fines under Law 5378 and the Labour Law quota; (2) TİHEK discrimination fines under Law 6701; (3) civil damages under the Turkish Code of Obligations, uncapped; (4) public-procurement disqualification; and (5) criminal-law exposure under the Turkish Penal Code for discrimination offences. All figures below are presented in Turkish lira (TRY), with euro reference values at an indicative EUR/TRY ≈ 35 rate; the underlying TRY figures are revalued annually under the Tax Procedure Law's revaluation rate (which has run at 50 %+ in recent years), so euro-equivalents move sharply year to year and should be treated as orientation rather than fixed numbers.

Layer 1 — administrative fines under Law 5378 and the Labour Law quota

Layer 2 — TİHEK discrimination fines under Law 6701

Türkiye's TİHEK fine ceiling sits at the lower end of the international spread once converted to euros, but the per-violation figure has roughly tripled in nominal TRY terms over the 2022–2026 revaluation cycle. The institution's stated policy in its 2025 annual report is to prioritise corrective-action orders over high one-off fines where the respondent engages constructively, but to escalate to the upper end of the band for systemic non-compliance and for refusal to cooperate.

Layer 3 — civil damages under the Code of Obligations

Beyond the administrative-fine and TİHEK tracks, complainants in disability-discrimination cases may pursue parallel civil claims in the general courts under the Turkish Code of Obligations (Türk Borçlar Kanunu, Law No. 6098). The Code of Obligations sets no statutory cap on non-material (moral) damages — the courts assess them by reference to the severity of the breach, the duration of the discriminatory conduct, the size and resources of the respondent, and the broader public-interest implications of the case. Awards in disability-discrimination cases over the last decade have typically fallen in the TRY 10,000 – 200,000 range per claimant in nominal terms (revalued over time), with a small number of high-profile cases involving inaccessible essential services reaching higher. Civil and TİHEK proceedings can run in parallel; the existence of one does not bar the other.

Layer 4 — public-procurement disqualification

The Turkish Public Procurement Law (Kamu İhale Kanunu, Law No. 4734) requires contracting authorities to consider accessibility from the technical-specification stage onward and allows for disqualification of bidders that have been found to have committed serious professional misconduct — a category that includes adjudicated accessibility-related findings under Law 5378 and discrimination decisions under Law 6701. For vendors selling into the Turkish public sector, the loss of bid eligibility on an active procurement typically runs in the tens of millions of TRY; the layer-4 exposure routinely dwarfs the administrative fine that triggered it by one to two orders of magnitude.

Layer 5 — criminal-law exposure under the Turkish Penal Code

Article 122 of the Turkish Penal Code (Türk Ceza Kanunu, Law No. 5237) criminalises certain forms of discrimination — including discrimination on grounds of disability — where the conduct involves refusal to provide a good or service, refusal of employment, or hindrance of the exercise of an economic activity. Conviction carries a prison sentence of one to three years or a judicial fine. The provision has been used sparingly in disability-discrimination cases — TİHEK's quasi-judicial track is by far the more common route — but it is on the books and is occasionally referred by TİHEK to the prosecutor in egregious cases. The pressure of a parallel criminal-law referral routinely produces a step-change in how aggressively a respondent engages with TİHEK's corrective-action timeline.

Enforcement record and outlook

Enforcement under Law No. 5378 through the provincial accessibility-monitoring commissions has been steady but uneven across the 81 provinces. The Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir commissions issue the bulk of the substantive findings; the smaller provinces follow EYHGM's national guidance but produce fewer published decisions. The 2024–2028 strategy commits EYHGM to a standardisation programme — common findings templates, common timelines, and a centralised disclosure of all commission decisions on the EYHGM website — that is being rolled out through 2026.

TİHEK's caseload on digital-inaccessibility-as-discrimination has been the most visible enforcement strand over the last three years. The institution's 2024 and 2025 annual reports describe decisions against major Turkish retail banks, telecommunications operators, municipal-administration portals and large e-commerce platforms — most concluded with a corrective-action order plus an administrative fine in the mid-band. Several of these decisions are in the appeal phase before the Council of State (Danıştay) and the administrative courts; early indications are that the courts are upholding TİHEK's substantive findings of discrimination more often than not, while occasionally adjusting the proportionality of the fine.

The Labour Law Article 30 quota produces by far the largest aggregate fine volume because the fines accrue automatically against the monthly SGK headcount filings. The Ministry of Labour and Social Security's most recent published figures (covering 2024) report several hundred million TRY in annual quota fines flowing into the disability employment fund — a stream that finances vocational rehabilitation, reasonable-accommodation grants to employers, and supported-employment programmes.

What's coming in 2026–28

Three concrete developments to watch. First, the Türkiye Disability Strategy and Action Plan 2024–2028 commits to a phased harmonisation of public-sector website accessibility with the WAD framework and to a feasibility study on EAA-style obligations for private-sector products and services through 2027–28. The strategy is the policy document that lines up the implementation pathway across EYHGM, CBDDO, TİHEK, KVKK and BTK and against which the next CRPD review will measure progress.

Second, the Presidential Digital Transformation Office is operationalising an updated KAMİS revision aligned to WCAG 2.2 once EN 301 549 formally tracks the new version; the revised KAMİS is expected through 2026 and will become the central public-procurement compliance bar for public-sector ICT contracts.

Third, Türkiye's next periodic report to the CRPD Committee is due in the 2027–28 cycle, and accessibility implementation — across the Law 5378 track, the TİHEK equality track, the Labour Law quota track, and the strategy's WAD/EAA alignment commitments — will feature prominently in the next round of Concluding Observations. As an EU-accession candidate sitting at the crossroads of European, Middle Eastern and Central Asian markets, Türkiye's regulatory trajectory has implications well beyond the country itself: Turkish manufacturers and service providers placing products on EU markets are already in the EAA's extraterritorial scope, and Turkish public-sector procurement specifications routinely flow through to suppliers across the region.