Medical Confidentiality and Mandatory Reporting Duty in Turkish Criminal Law

Abstract

Medical practitioners such as physicians, clinicians, midwives and nurses are obliged to immediately inform the authorities, when they, during performing medical practices, come across some sort of clues showing that a crime has been committed. This duty is stipulated in Art. 280 of Turkish Criminal Code in 2005. However, medical practitioners are ethically bound to confidentiality, which dates back to the Hippocratic Oath. While this essay focuses on the competing ideas between mandatory reporting law and medical confidentiality in respect to arguments which are developed in comparative law analysis, the central basis of this essay is to examine the elements of the crime type- not fulfilling the mandatory reporting- as it is stipulated in Art. 280.