Release agreements in Turkish labor law

Within the framework of the innovations brought to the Turkish Code of Obligations No. 6098 ("TCO"), application areas of the release agreements have come out of a limited scope. According to the previous code, Court of Cassation were interpreting the release agreements and making decisions to to protect the vulnerable worker in disputes. Within the regulation brought by the new law, a regulation was introduced instead of the interpretation of the Court of Cassation on this subject, and it was aimed to reduce the workload of the Court of Cassation. In particular, the release agreements signed after July 1, 2012 are subject to strict conditions in order to protect the vulnerable worker. The release agreement is based on the law of obligations and it is regulated by the provisions of Articles 132 and 420 of the TCO. The basis of the concept of release means the termination of the debt relationship between the two parties. In this sense, release is referred to as a contract. In this study, legal nature of the release is emphasized and the positions of the release agreements against similar agreements are revealed. This study prioritize the changes made within the framework of some principle decisions made by the Supreme Court between the years 2019-2022 and the legal dimension of the release agreement. The agreement documents between the employer and the employee based on the Law on Mediation in Civil Disputes No. 6325 are also included in our subject. In this context, this study aims to clarify whether the mediation agreement document contains the provisions of the release and whether the agreement document is subject to judicial review. Within the scope of all these explained issues, the reason why this thesis topic was chosen as the release agreements is to explain the adaptation of the release agreement to the changing legal system in accordance with the principle decisions of the Court of Cassation.