Special situations in the transfer appointment of civil servants

Transfer appointments are administrative actions involving the change of duties, duty stations, service classes or institutions of civil servants. Transfer appointments may be applied upon the request of the civil servant or may be applied ex officio by the administration without the request of the civil servant. The administration is granted a wide discretionary authority regarding transfer appointments. This subject is regulated in Articles 71 and following of the Public Civil Servants Law No. 657. However, how this authority should be used and what are its scope and limits are not sufficiently clear in the relevant articles of the Law. This situation makes transfer appointments a means of sanction and leads to personal and arbitrary practices. Therefore, there is a need to determine the issues that the administration should consider when exercising its discretionary authority in transfer procedures. The aim of our study is to reveal how and in what direction the administration should act while using the discretionary authority granted to it by the legislature in transfer appointments. In this context, both the special regulations in the legislation and the jurisprudence developed by the judicial authorities have been handled in a systematic manner, and some criteria that the administration should take into consideration in transfer procedures have been determined. Thus, the scope and limits of the discretionary authority in transfer procedures are tried to be further clarified.