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Turkish succession law starts from a protective premise: descendants, parents and the surviving spouse are statutory heirs, and a core slice of their statutory share — the reserved portion (Art. 506) — cannot be touched by the deceased. Whatever remains is the disposable portion, and only over that portion may the deceased dispose by will or by contract of succession (Art. 505). Disinheritance is the narrow exception that breaks this scheme: it removes the reserved portion itself.

Because it is an exception to a protective rule, the courts read it restrictively. That single sentence explains almost every outcome in this deck.

Three statutory channels

• Art. 510(1) — punitive disinheritance. The heir has committed a serious offence against the deceased or one of the deceased's close relations.
• Art. 510(2) — family-law disinheritance. The heir has substantially failed to perform obligations arising from family law towards the deceased or the deceased's family members.
• Art. 513 — protective disinheritance for insolvency. A descendant against whom a certificate of insolvency has been issued may be disinherited as to half of the reserved portion, on condition that this half is allocated to that descendant's own children.

Do not confuse the channel with its neighbours

Disqualification from inheritance (Art. 578) operates automatically by force of law and needs no instrument. Renunciation (Art. 605) is the heir's own act. Abatement (Art. 560 et seq.) does not remove an heir; it claws back the reserved portion. Disinheritance is different from all three: it requires a disposition upon death, a stated ground, and, if challenged, proof.

The Court of Cassation General Assembly of Civil Chambers characterizes disinheritance as "a civil-law sanction, a kind of private-law penalty, applied to a person who has shown that he is unworthy of the family bond" (HGK 2023/53 E., 2024/464 K., 25.09.2024 — the leading decision in this deck). Two consequences follow from that single characterization, and both are examinable.

First, a penalty needs a legally defined ground. The deceased cannot disinherit because a child married the wrong person, chose the wrong career, or simply fell out of favour. The ground must fit Art. 510(1), Art. 510(2) or Art. 513.

Second, a penalty needs proportionality. This is why the General Assembly insists that the words "serious offence" in the first paragraph and "substantial failure" in the second be read consistently and proportionately with each other. If they are not, "the condition for disinheritance in the first paragraph is subject to very heavy requirements, while under the second paragraph deprivation of the reserved portion may follow in a more flexible and easier way."

The two cumulative elements

• Objective element — the conduct must be of a nature capable of severing the family bond. Without this filter, disinheritance turns, in the General Assembly's words, into "an instrument of pressure that the deceased may use against the heirs."
• Subjective element — the conduct must have in fact severed the bond. A quarrel followed by twenty more years of living together does not satisfy this.

Both elements must be present. This is the single most frequently missed point in practice.

The last row is the trap. In HGK 2023/422 E., 2024/370 K. (10.07.2024) the General Assembly restated the principle of indissolubility: an adoptive relationship validly established cannot be undone later except for the exhaustively listed defects of formation. If the adopter wants the adoptee out of the estate, the correct route is disinheritance under Art. 510 — or disqualification under Art. 578 — and the adoptive relationship itself survives regardless. Two chamber decisions carry the same idea into procedure: Y8HD 2018/14580 E., 2019/10590 K. (the case is an Art. 510 disinheritance case, so the civil court of first instance has jurisdiction, not the family court) and Y8HD 2019/993 E., 2019/8027 K. (the two claims must be severed; they cannot be tried together).

The disinheritance regime is built in four steps. Art. 510 says which grounds permit disinheritance. Art. 511 says what happens if disinheritance holds — the share passes as if the disinherited person had predeceased, and that person's descendants may claim their reserved portion. Art. 512 carries the whole practical weight: the ground must be stated in the instrument, the burden of proof lies on whoever benefits from the exclusion, and the consequences of failure are spelled out. Art. 513 is the separate, protective insolvency route.

Around this core sit the articles you need for the arithmetic and for the creditor dimension: Art. 505 (disposable portion), Art. 506 (the reserved-portion fractions), Art. 560 (abatement), and Art. 562 (the creditors' and bankruptcy administration's own abatement action).

In the deck, clicking any article reference opens the full statutory text.

The most common student error is to reach for the Criminal Code and ask how many years' imprisonment the conduct attracts. That is the wrong question. The settled test, stated in Y3HD 2013/15148 E., 2013/16683 K. and confirmed at General Assembly level in HGK 2024/464, runs:

• A conviction is not required. "The heir need not have been convicted of the offence; the existence of a final judgment of conviction is not a condition." Completion of the offence, amnesty and limitation are equally beside the point.
• The judge measures the effect on the family bond. The gravity of the act is assessed "not in the context of the rules of criminal law, but according to the principles of civil law in terms of the effect the act has on family bonds."
• The deceased's own fault is weighed. If the deceased is at least as much at fault as the heir, the disinheritance fails.

The two poles in the case law

The accepted case is Y2HD 2008/3734 E., 2009/13172 K.: the son attempted to kill the deceased and killed the deceased's wife's brother, both established by an assize court judgment. The Second Chamber wrote that "the existence of the ground of disinheritance stated in the disposition has been proved, and as regards him the exclusion is valid."

The rejected case is Y3HD 2013/16683: insults and a death threat uttered in 1988 during an argument the deceased himself started, after which the family in fact went on living together until 2009. Objectively insufficient; subjectively no severance. The disinheritance was struck down and the reserved portion preserved.

Between them lies Y3HD 2015/11678 E., 2015/19101 K.: allegations of an attempt on the deceased's life ended in acquittal, and the guardianship proceedings the heirs had brought were held to be protective of the family rather than destructive of it. Disinheritance void; Art. 512(3) applied.

Read literally, Art. 510(2) looks like the softer route: no offence is needed, only a failure to perform family-law obligations. HGK 2024/464 closes that gap deliberately. Because the two paragraphs must be read proportionately, a breach under the second paragraph must also be "of such gravity and intensity as to justify punishment as if a serious offence had been committed." The General Assembly adds that "the breach of some obligations should not by itself be regarded as sufficient."

Reciprocity — Art. 322

Art. 322 obliges parents and children "to help one another, to show respect and understanding, and to protect the honour of the family, as the peace and integrity of the family require." The General Assembly stresses that this obligation is mutual. In the 2024 case the father had refused to attend his son's engagement ceremony and had started the estrangement himself; that conduct was weighed against him.

Where the line actually falls

Conduct held sufficient is concrete, dated and severe: shaking and insulting the mother at a funeral combined with years of no contact (Y3HD 2018/7003 E., 2019/2130 K.); leaving home, marrying without informing the family, years of silence, and asking during a forced visit whether there was "a grave plot to lie in" (Y3HD 2019/5571 E., 2021/471 K.); persistent indifference during the deceased's paralysis and the mother's cancer (Y2HD 2013/22710 E., 2013/26667 K., upheld over a dissent).

Conduct held insufficient is generalized: "he did not look after his father properly." In Y3HD 2024/292 E., 2024/1695 K. the Third Chamber, deciding a revocation-of-gift case, held that even accepting the witnesses' evidence of neglect, it could not be counted as "substantial contravention of obligations arising from statute" — and expressly noted that the conditions for revoking a gift and the grounds for disinheritance "must be examined together." A useful pre-litigation test: an allegation that fails under TCO 295 will very likely fail under Art. 510(2).

The boundary with the law of obligations

HGK 2024/464 also fixes a limit that is regularly missed in pleadings: "the abuse of a power of attorney is not, by itself, capable of supporting the existence of a situation requiring disinheritance." A mandate is a contract of the law of obligations, and its breach is sanctioned there — by an action for damages or for cancellation of title, not by removal of the reserved portion.

Three patterns explain the whole table. Concreteness: sufficient facts are dated, witnessed and specific. Severance in fact: where the family kept living together after the incident, the subjective element fails. The deceased's own contribution: wherever the deceased started or fuelled the rupture, the sanction is withheld.

Art. 512(1) makes disinheritance valid only if the deceased stated the ground in the disposition itself. An unexplained exclusion is not a disinheritance; at most it is a disposition over the disposable portion, and the reserved portion survives untouched.

What the article does not require is a formula. In Y7HD 2025/2556 E., 2026/613 K. (05.02.2026 — the most recent decision in this archive, and the first from the Seventh Chamber after succession disputes moved there) the will read: "I absolutely do not want my son …, who in my old age has in no way concerned himself with me, has not called or asked after me, and has met none of my needs, to take any right or share from my estate." The Seventh Chamber characterized that sentence, ground and all, as a disinheritance under Art. 510(2). The lesson is symmetrical: the words "I disinherit" are not required, but a stated ground is.

Note also what happens procedurally when nobody objects. The disinherited son in that case did not bring an annulment action; he merely "accepted" the enforcement claim. The Chamber held that once the exclusion goes unchallenged, it takes effect, the share passes to the descendants under Art. 511(2)–(3), and the action to enforce the will must be directed against them. The disinherited person's acceptance cannot cure the missing party.

Art. 512(2) allocates the burden to whoever profits from the exclusion — the co-heir or the legatee — as soon as the disinherited person objects. This allocation decides a very large share of the reported cases, because in practice the beneficiaries often file no evidence at all.

Y3HD 2017/14203 E., 2017/14640 K. is the clean illustration: one defendant admitted the claim, one answered without offering evidence, the rest did not answer. The ground was therefore unproved, and Art. 512(3) followed automatically.

Two refinements worth carrying into a hearing. Witness evidence is not disqualified merely because the witness is interested: in Y3HD 2019/2130 the Chamber accepted the testimony of a person close to the family, observing that where no other evidence exists, the witness account is given weight. But in Y3HD 2024/1695 two opposing groups of interested witnesses were treated as cancelling each other out. The practical rule is that interested testimony carries weight when it is uncontradicted and concrete, and very little when it is matched by an equally interested account on the other side.

Art. 512(3) contains two separate propositions, and confusing them is the classic error. The General Assembly separated them in the sharpest possible terms in HGK 2010/582 E., 2010/633 K.: "the legal consequence of each fact is different."

• First sentence — the ground was not stated, or was not proved. The disposition remains valid within the disposable portion. The excluded heir keeps the reserved portion and the case continues as an abatement action.
• Second sentence — the deceased acted under a manifest error as to the ground. The disinheritance is wholly void, and the excluded heir takes the entire statutory share.

Failure of proof is not, in itself, manifest error. That is the holding of HGK 2013/129 E., 2013/1585 K., decided on the same file: manifest error requires that the events the deceased treated as grounds did not exist and that the deceased perceived them as existing. The General Assembly found the deceased had genuinely believed in the grounds, and drew support from the fact that she never revoked the 2002 will before her death in 2006.

Two procedural riders

• The court must examine abatement of its own motion. Art. 512(3) directs the court to determine the reserved portion, and HGK 2024/464 held unanimously that this "constitutes a provision derogating from the principle that the court is bound by the parties' claims, within the meaning of Art. 26(2) CCP." So a claimant who challenged the exclusion but did not separately plead abatement cannot have the case dismissed on that ground. The earlier decision HGK 2017/3-1017 E., 2018/1750 K., which held the opposite, is distinguished because the will in that file contained no disinheritance clause at all.
• Reversal has only relative effect. In Y3HD 2017/14640 the judgment was reversed only in favour of the defendant who had appealed; as against the defendants who did not appeal, the judgment became final. In multi-defendant disinheritance files the outcome can therefore split defendant by defendant.

If the disinheritance holds, Art. 511 produces a chain that is easiest to learn as a story. A father disinherits his son; the son is alive. The son takes nothing and, expressly, cannot bring an abatement action. Unless the deceased provided otherwise, the son's share passes as though he had predeceased the deceased — to his own descendants, and if there are none, to the deceased's other statutory heirs. Those grandchildren may then claim their reserved portion, again calculated as if their father had predeceased.

So the estate does not enlarge for the other heirs by the full share; it enlarges only by the difference between the son's share and the grandchildren's reserved portion.

The rule reaches the registry and the courtroom

Y14HD 2021/1891 E., 2021/3791 K.: even where the disinheritance had become final after an unsuccessful annulment action, the grandchild born in 2015 had to be shown in the certificate of inheritance, and the judgment had to be framed so that the disposition operates outside the reserved portion. A final disinheritance does not erase the descendants' entitlement.

Y7HD 2025/2556 E., 2026/613 K. completes the picture on the procedural side: in an action to enforce the will, the correct defendant is the descendant, not the excluded heir, and the court must identify the descendant of its own motion.

Art. 513 lets the deceased disinherit a descendant against whom a certificate of insolvency has been issued, but only as to half the reserved portion, and only if that half is allocated to the descendant's own born and unborn children. If, when the succession opens, the certificate has lost its effect, or the debt it covers does not exceed half the descendant's share, the disinheritance is annulled at the descendant's request.

No Court of Cassation decision applying Art. 513 to concrete facts has been located in this archive. What exists are definitions, in Y3HD 2015/19101 and Y3HD 2017/14640 ("protective disinheritance … aimed at allocating half of the descendant's reserved portion to the heir's children, with a view to protecting those children").

The creditor dimension is nevertheless well covered — through Art. 562, not Art. 513. HGK 2020/540 E., 2021/1223 K. (14.10.2021) sets out the framework. Where the disinherited heir does not object to the exclusion, the bankruptcy administration or the heir's creditors may bring the abatement action in their own right; that right is "entirely independent of the right of action belonging to the heir whose reserved portion is impaired." Four cumulative conditions apply: the disposable portion must have been exceeded; there must be a bankruptcy judgment or certificate of insolvency against the heir; the heir must not have brought the action; and a notice calling on the heir to sue must have remained fruitless.

Two limits follow, both examinable. The notice is a special procedural prerequisite that cannot be completed later — a notice returned undelivered has not "remained fruitless"; it never took place, and the defect cannot be cured on appeal. And the bankruptcy administration, not being an heir or a legatee, cannot seek annulment of the will; it may only ask that the part of the disposition encroaching on the reserved portion be set aside. Y3HD 2014/11623 E., 2015/4437 K. confirms the same line independently: "the certificate of insolvency and the notice are separate procedural prerequisites."

The distinction to memorize: under Art. 513 the certificate of insolvency is a condition of the deceased's power to disinherit; under Art. 562 it is a condition of the creditor's right of action.

• Subject-matter jurisdiction. Disputes under Art. 510 et seq. belong to the civil court of first instance, not the family court — a matter of public order, examined of the court's own motion. Y14HD 2016/10083 E., 2019/4473 K. reversed a judgment given by a court sitting as a family court. Y8HD 2018/14580 E., 2019/10590 K. applied the same rule after recharacterizing a claim that had been pleaded as termination of adoption; the judge is under a duty to characterize the facts in law.
• Severance. A claim to terminate an adoption and a claim to disinherit cannot be tried in the same file; they belong to different courts and must be severed — Y8HD 2019/993 E., 2019/8027 K.
• Joinder of parties. The annulment action is brought against the deceased's statutory heirs and against the descendants of the excluded heir. No judgment on the merits may be given until the party composition is complete — Y14HD 2016/16304 E., 2020/7482 K.
• Conflict of interest between counsel. The excluded heir and that heir's own descendants have opposing interests: if the exclusion is annulled the excluded heir takes the share, whereas if it stands the descendants take under Art. 511(2)–(3). One lawyer cannot represent both; the defect touches public order and must be cured before the merits — Y8HD 2013/11103 E., 2014/11731 K. (Attorneys Act No. 1136, Art. 38(b)).
• The court is not bound by the parties' claims. Where Art. 512(3) applies, the court determines the reserved portion and conducts the abatement examination of its own motion — HGK 2024/464, unanimously.
• Relative effect of reversal. The benefit of a reversal extends only to the defendant who appealed — Y3HD 2017/14640.
• Enforcement of the will. No special prerequisite applies to an action to enforce a will; if an annulment action is pending it is treated as a preliminary question, but the absence of such an action is not a reason for dismissal — Y3HD 2014/11623 E., 2015/4437 K.

1. Is there a disposition upon death containing an intention to exclude? No set formula is needed; a stated ground plus clear exclusion suffices (Y7HD 2026/613).
2. Is the ground stated in the instrument? (Art. 512(1)) If not, the reserved portion is preserved.
3. Has the excluded heir objected? If not, the exclusion takes effect, the share passes to the descendants, and proceedings are directed against them (Art. 511(2)–(3)). The heir's creditors or bankruptcy administration may still sue for abatement under Art. 562, subject to the certificate of insolvency and a fruitless notice.
4. If there is an objection, the beneficiary of the exclusion bears the burden of proof (Art. 512(2)).
5. Which ground, and does it clear the threshold? Art. 510(1): effect on the family bond, not the criminal tariff. Art. 510(2): read proportionately with the first paragraph. Art. 513: protective insolvency route. A breach of the law of obligations is not a ground.
6. Apply the two-element test: was the conduct objectively capable of severing the bond, and did it in fact sever it?
7. Weigh reciprocity: the deceased's own conduct and fault are placed on the scales (Art. 322).
8. Outcome. Valid → no share for the excluded heir; the share passes to the descendants, who may claim their reserved portion. Ground unproved → Art. 512(3), first sentence: reserved portion preserved. Manifest error proved → Art. 512(3), second sentence: the exclusion is wholly void and the entire share is taken.
9. Procedure: examine abatement of the court's own motion where Art. 512(3) applies; remember the relative effect of reversal, the conflict-of-interest rule, complete joinder, and jurisdiction in the civil court of first instance.