Turkish Prime Minister Loses Lawsuit Against Students

By Ayla Albayrak

It was one small step for Turkey’s prime minister, but one giant leap for a student theater troupe when a court acquitted them Wednesday of charges that it had insulted Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan lost his lawsuit against a student theater troupe.

A couple of weeks ago, Ms. Umutlu was writing her thesis crunched over her laptop on a bus with some 40 fellow students, driving through Istanbul’s streets on a gray weekday morning. Some were napping, someone was reading a newspaper and one flipping through a cartoon. It was the fourth time they had traveled to the court house in Catalca, outside Istanbul, to attend hearings instead of studying.

The troupe had angered some people in Catalca with a song called “Tayyip Blues,” which they sang at an open-air festival last summer.

Mr. Erdogan’s lawyer, Abdullah Guler, claimed that the group had not only called the prime minister a “street vendor” in its song, but it had also booed at him and encouraged others to boo, too. Mr. Erdogan sued. At the hearing, Mr. Guler had the case adjourned until Wednesday (he wanted it postponed until after the June 12 elections, but the judge refused).

Returning Wednesday, the court decided in favor of the 16 students named in the lawsuit.

“(Mr. Guler) insisted that there should be punishment for upsetting the prime minister, but the court said that what the students did was not enough to constitute a crime,” said one of the troupe’s lawyers, Ozgur Urfa. The court will make a written statement on its decision next month.

“The question is: Is a word which upsets a person and belittles him in public, and upsets the listeners (in Catalca), too, an insult or not? It certainly is and should be punished,” said Mr. Guler.

“It’s not over yet… Do you think it is normal that person beloved by the society is belittled in public?” he said. Mr. Guler said the prime minister had the right to appeal, but had not yet made a decision.

Mr. Erdogan frequently sues people under an article of Turkey’s penal code that criminalizes insults to a person’s honor. It isn’t known how many people he has sued since becoming prime minister in 2003, but the number is thought to be in the hundreds.

The Wall Street Journal wrote about some of the people Mr. Erdogan has sued for alleged insults, including the Beyoglu Kumpanya, singers, writers and cartoonists.

via Turkish Prime Minister Loses Lawsuit Against Students – Emerging Europe Real Time – WSJ.