The Grey passport scandal refers to a human trafficking scheme facilitated through the issuing of so-called Grey passports usually provided to Turkish diplomats and other civil servants to travel abroad without fulfilling the visa requirements. With such passports, it is estimated that several thousand Turkish citizens travelled abroad disguised as public civil servants and did not return. The scandal began with an article focusing in a case of 43 people who have been smuggled out of Turkey over the Municipality of Malatya by means of this scheme, published in the Turkish newspaper Habertürk in April 2021. The Turkish Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu admitted that several hundred of the recipients of Grey Passports did not return after their passports were invalidated and the Ministry of t