Av. Serkan Kara, Founder, Serka Law Firm

Attorney at law, in the legal profession since 2015.

Trained in Turkish and continental civil law at the Faculty of Law of Uludağ University, and read in United States law at the Faculty of Law of the University of Cologne. The legal position of foreigners and citizenship by investment sit at the centre of his work, and the records behind this page, the registers, the sealed instruments and the diplomas, are shown or linked beside the claims they prove.

• 28.04.2016Entered on the roll
• CCBEEuropean lawyer’s identity card

He is an attorney of the Istanbul Bar, registered with the Union of Turkish Bar Associations and a holder of the CCBE Lawyer’s Professional Identity Card. He works on matters in which two legal systems have to agree at once, and he reads a file the way a scientist reads a result: the document itself, then the source it rests on, then the measurement, and only then the written word. He handles every file of the firm himself and answers for each one personally.

Two legal families, on record

The education line runs from school to the bar. He read law at the Faculty of Law of Uludağ University in Bursa and completed the four-year Bachelor of Law (LLB) there, the degree awarded on 4 February 2015. Before the university came Nixar Anatolian High School and, from the first year of its middle-school stage, Niksar İÖO. The diploma hangs framed in the firm’s office. Its first page is shown below, with the diploma number, the certifying stamp, the signatures and the signatories’ names blurred in the image itself.

On the Turkish and continental side the record is the admission itself, and it carries dates. His traineeship ran before the courts from 17 March 2015 to 17 September 2015 and with an advocate from 18 September 2015 to 18 March 2016, a full year. The board of the Istanbul Bar Association entered him on the roll by decision of 28 April 2016, his Avukatlık Ruhsatnamesi, the Turkish certificate of advocacy, is dated 2 June 2016, and the Union of Turkish Bar Associations carries him on its register. The roll entry is public and opens on the record itself: Istanbul Bar roll.

On the common-law side the record is a transcript. While still a law student at Uludağ he spent the academic year 2012 to 2013 at the Faculty of Law of the University of Cologne as an Erasmus student, matriculated on 24 September 2012, on the faculty’s programme in United States law, CUSL: US family law, business law, legal negotiations and American legal terminology, 24 ECTS in all. Two of those subjects were graded vollbefriedigend, a grade that, on the scale the transcript itself describes, 10 to 12 per cent of candidates reach. The Transcript of Records was issued by the faculty’s Centre for International Relations on 15 April 2013 and again on 14 March 2022. It is sealed and apostilled, and its second page, the grading table, is shown below. The two families read the same contractual clause differently, and a foreign client’s exposure usually sits in the space between the two readings. Reading both is what lets a file opened in one country hold before a court, a registry or a bank in another.

• Law diploma, Uludağ University, 4 February 2015
• Transcript, page 2: the grading table

The CCBE Lawyer’s Professional Identity Card, created in 1978, is issued in the CCBE’s name by the national bar once it has verified that the applicant is a lawyer currently authorised and registered with it. It identifies its holder, in the CCBE’s official languages, as a lawyer admitted in his own country, eases his access to courts and institutions outside it, and is recognised by the European Court of Justice and the Court of First Instance, as the CCBE’s own page states.

Method

He enters a file in a fixed order: the document itself, then the statute or the scientific source it rests on, then every date, figure and register entry measured against its source, and the written word last. Beside the law he reads medicine, pharmacology, forensic toxicology and social psychology in their primary literature. Where a matter rests on a medical report, a medicine’s authorised product information or a laboratory result, the published text of that science stands in the pleading beside the statute, so the knowledge a judge has to weigh reaches the judge with its source. Official letters and expert reports are read in the same way, against the file and the sources they cite. His articles are written with the same discipline.

The habit is older than the profession. His reading began at the age of six with the Ana Britannica encyclopaedia and has not stopped since. Learning, in his own words, is the greatest nourishment in life.

Foreigners before the Turkish state

The legal position of foreigners in Türkiye has been at the centre of his work since his first years in the profession, and the trust placed in him there stands on the record of four foreign states. The Consulates-General in Istanbul of Kyrgyzstan (20 June 2016), Kazakhstan (11 July 2016), Uzbekistan (9 March 2017) and Ukraine (11 March 2019) appointed Av. Serkan Kara, by general powers of attorney under their seals, to act before the Turkish courts, enforcement offices, ministries and migration authorities. The Kazakh, Uzbek and Kyrgyz instruments add the power to obtain, from public and private institutions, the information and documents that concern the consulate and its nationals. He conducted the consular representations under these genuine powers of attorney, received officially and in person from the consulates general, and he still carries them on from time to time.

• Kyrgyzstan, 20.06.2016
• Kyrgyzstan, sealed page
• Kazakhstan, 11.07.2016, No 471
• Uzbekistan, 09.03.2017
• Uzbekistan, sealed page
• Ukraine, 11.03.2019
• Ukraine, sealed page

The images are the sealed pages of the instruments, which are drawn up in Turkish. The issuing consulate-general, the date and number of each instrument and Av. Serkan Kara’s name remain legible. Identity numbers, addresses, a telephone number, the names of the signing consuls and every signature, those drawn across a seal included, are blurred in the image itself.

The field side of that trust was the Kumkapı Removal Centre in Istanbul, where he worked alongside the consuls of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan and with the deputy governor then serving as Istanbul’s Provincial Director of Migration Management. That work laid the ground for an amendment to Law No. 6458 on Foreigners and International Protection, the statute that governs how foreigners enter Türkiye, stay there and are removed from it, and the statute on which the firm’s deportation and entry-ban work rests today.

A foreign state’s record can also take the form of a list. On 1 October 2026 the consular section of the Consulate General of Romania in Istanbul confirmed in writing that Av. Serkan Kara is “on our list of lawyers”, the list the consulate provides to Romanian citizens who ask it for legal advice. The reply is reproduced below. It names no official and carries no personal number, so nothing in it is blurred.

• Romania, 01.10.2026

Lists, offices and languages

The Russian Foreign Ministry’s list of lawyers in Turkey of October 2025 carries the firm he founded, under its Turkish name Serka Hukuk Bürosu, with his name inside the entry. The Russian Embassy in Ankara and the Consulates General in Antalya, Istanbul and Trabzon compiled it from what the listed lawyers supplied and describes it as informational, not a recommendation, and it is cited here on that footing. Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute carries him in its lawyer directory, as a claimed profile. He serves as Vice President of TÜSODER, the Turkish consumer-rights association (the association’s board page, archived 14 July 2026), and his commentary on consumer and commercial law has been broadcast by CNN Türk, A Haber, Flash TV, Beykent TV and the DHA news agency.

He has spoken English since the age of seven, which is why an English contract is read rather than translated. He speaks German fluently and without an accent, with the year at the Faculty of Law of the University of Cologne behind it, and everyday Russian fluently and without an accent. He has been to Russia eleven times, has been to and lived in many countries of the world, the United States among them, and holds a ten-year United States B1/B2 visa, which leaves him free to travel at any time for foreign relations and cooperation.

Where the record is applied

The record is applied most visibly in Turkish citizenship by investment, where the route, the valuation, the banking chain and the title-deed annotation have to be correct at the same time, and in deportation and entry-ban matters under Law No. 6458. The firm he founded acts wherever the client’s file is, in any country and any city, in the client’s own language, and a client abroad instructs it on a power of attorney without travelling.

The full biography

The complete account of his education, admissions and practice is published at serkankara.av.tr.