Türkiye as a Laboratory of Mandatory Mediation: Institutional Transformation, Judicial Control and Access to Justice

Türkiye offers a significant case of the rapid institutionalisation of mediation within a civil- law justice system. Following the establishment of a modern statutory framework in 2012, Turkish mediation evolved from a predominantly voluntary process into an extensive system of mandatory pre-litigation participation covering major categories of labour, commercial, consumer, tenancy and other civil disputes. This expansion normalised mediation at a scale that voluntary uptake alone may not have achieved, but it also generated increasingly complex questions concerning access to courts, procedural sanctions, bargaining inequality, settlement finality and the allocation of risk at the gateway to adjudication. This article develops a longitudinal and critical account of Türkiye’s mediation experience from 2012 to 2026. Combining doctrinal analysis, structured bilingual literature mapping, jurisprudential analysis and critical assessment of official implementation data, it advances a three-phase account of institutional construction, mandatory expansion, and constitutionalisation and quality control. The central argument is that Türkiye should be understood not merely as a successful case of mediation uptake but as a regulatory laboratory exposing a central paradox of mandatory ADR: the institutional mechanisms that rapidly normalise consensual dispute resolution can simultaneously create new forms of procedural coercion and gateway complexity. The article further argues that settlement rates provide an incomplete measure of institu tional success. A mature assessment must also consider meaningful autonomy, proportionality of sanctions, procedural navigability, distributional effects, protection of vulnerable parties, mediator quality and effective judicial safeguards. Drawing on the Turkish experience, the article develops an access-, legitimacy- and quality-oriented framework for evaluating mandatory mediation systems and concludes that the next phase of reform should prioritise institutional consolidation over expansion for its own sake.