Turkish Premier to Drop Lawsuits

By MARC CHAMPION

ISTANBUL—Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan will drop all lawsuits he has lodged against private individuals, politicians and journalists for insulting him, a spokesman said Thursday.

Since taking office in 2003, Mr. Erdogan has made liberal use of a Turkish law that makes it a crime to insult a person’s honor, punishable by up to two years in jail or a fine. Targets of his suits have included a stand-up comic who made an off-color joke about abortion; political opponents; a student theater troupe; and several cartoonists who caricatured the prime minister as various animals.

The spokesman for Mr. Erdogan said the decision to drop the suits was designed to boost a spirit of consensus and reconciliation after a rough election campaign, which ended Sunday in a sweeping victory for Mr. Erdogan and his ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP.

The spokesman didn’t give the number of ongoing lawsuits that would be dropped. The government hasn’t given the total number of suits Mr. Erdogan has brought under article 125 of the penal code since 2005. That year, two years after he took office, it said he had brought 57 cases.

The AKP won one in every two votes in the country on Sunday. Mr. Erdogan has pledged to embrace those who voted against him and to seek consensus with his political opponents as he tries to rewrite the country’s constitution.

On the campaign trail, Mr. Erdogan and the main opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu traded lawsuits. Mr. Kilicdaroglu, who heads the Republican People’s Party, or CHP, won’t drop his suit, a spokesman said, because the cases were different. Mr. Erdogan’s insult wasn’t against Mr. Kilicdaroglu personally, but against the CHP, according to the CHP spokesman. Mr. Kilicdaroglu’s suit alleges Mr. Erdogan insulted the CHP by saying the party was in favor of military coups and was linked to criminal gangs.

“If from now on insulting attacks continue…this doesn’t mean the prime minister will not seek justice through the courts,” said Huseyin Celik, spokesman for the AKP, Turkey’s state-run Anadolu News Agency reported. Speaking of the offer to drop a case against Mr Kilicdaroglu specifically, Mr. Celik said, “We hope this gesture will be reciprocated.”

Even close supporters of Mr. Erdogan say privately that his lawsuits against students and cartoonists don’t help him appear tolerant and open to opposing views.

The Wall Street Journal ran an article on Mr. Erdogan’s suits in the week before the election. A new and high-profile case also caused waves in the lead-up to the vote, when the first hearing was held in a suit that Mr. Erdogan lodged against Ahmet Altan, editor of the liberal Taraf newspaper. In a January column, Mr. Altan had said the prime minister was becoming a bully in his search for power.

Mr. Altan wasn’t available to comment Thursday.

Defense lawyers and those who have been sued by Mr. Erdogan received the promise to drop the suits with skepticism. “It is useful, of course,” said Fikret Ilkiz, a prominent lawyer who deals in press-freedom cases. “But it relates only to himself. It does not help with ensuring freedom of expression for journalists and people in Turkey as a whole.”

Emre Yalcin, a member of a student theater group that was acquitted June 8 of insulting the prime minister’s honor by calling him a “street vendor” and allegedly booing him, said Thursday he didn’t believe the amnesty would stick. “I think that any group that’s against the AKP will face such things,” Mr. Yalcin said.

There are 57 journalists in Turkish jails, according to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Most are held under antiterrorism laws, many for allegedly conducting terrorist propaganda. Investigative reporters in Turkey sometimes face dozens of simultaneous prosecutions. The government has shut down thousands of websites and plans to introduce Internet filters in August. The government says no journalists are in jail for exercising free speech, and that the Internet filters will be voluntary.

“Erdogan wants to show that he’s applying ‘advanced democracy’ after the elections, but it’s only for show,” said the theater troupe’s lawyer, Serif Ozgur.

Mr. Ozgur is also defending the newspaper Sol, which Mr. Erdogan has sued for reprinting a cartoon that showed him as a range of different animals, from a monkey to an elephant. Mr. Ozgur said he hadn’t yet received word that the case had been dropped.

—Yeliz Candemir contributed to this article.

via Turkish Premier to Drop Lawsuits – WSJ.com.