Tag: freedom of speech

  • Freedom of speech in Turkey: A secularist’s lament

    Freedom of speech in Turkey: A secularist’s lament

    Freedom of speech in Turkey

    A secularist’s lament

    A blasphemy case raises new worries about freedom of speech in Turkey

    Apr 20th 2013 | ANKARA |From the print edition

    20130420_EUP002_0

    Fazil Say, a tweeting pianist

    “I AM not sure if you have noticed, but where there is a louse, a nonentity, a low life, thief or fool, they are all Islamists. Is this a paradox?” So wrote Fazil Say, a renowned Turkish pianist, in one of a series of irreverent tweets poking fun at Islam. Now Mr Say, who has an international career, has been given a ten-month suspended prison sentence under Article 216 of the penal code for hate speech. Prosecutors argued that Mr Say, a self-avowed atheist, had “denigrated the values of a section of the population” through his comments on Twitter. Should he repeat the offence within five years, he faces jail.

    Mr Say’s conviction prompted condemnation around the European Union, with which Turkey is in theory negotiating membership. Turkey’s EU minister, Egemen Bagis, conceded that “we cannot be pleased that either Fazil Say or any of our citizens is prosecuted for what they say or think…I wish the courts had evaluated this artist’s steps within the context of his freedom to be absurd.”

    The prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is unfazed. Asked to comment, he snapped “do not waste our time with such matters.” This reflects his ruling Justice and Development (AK) party’s often contradictory approach. The government is making its most ambitious stab yet at fixing the Kurdish problem through talks with the imprisoned PKK leader, Abdullah Ocalan. It hopes to introduce a new, more democratic constitution. Yet Turkey has become the world’s top jailer of journalists. And thousands of Kurdish activists and politicians are in jail on flimsy terrorism charges. For Turkey’s beleaguered secularists, Mr Say’s plight is more evidence of creeping religious conservatism since AK came to power ten years ago.

    Mr Erdogan was himself banned from politics and briefly jailed in 1998 for reciting a poem that incited “religious hatred.” But that was when the generals were using the judiciary to punish critics of Ataturk and secularism. Now it seems to be the turn of AK to use the courts to suppress attacks on Sunni Islam.

    Yet prosecutors look the other way when it comes to Jews or Armenians. “Laws to criminalise defamation in Turkey have only ever been implemented to protect the rights of the majority, never against vulnerable minorities,” notes Emma Sinclair-Webb, of Human Rights Watch. Rober Koptas, editor of Agos, an Armenian weekly, complained of failure to pursue those who planned the murder of his predecessor (and father-in-law), Hrant Dink, in 2007. Now Mr Koptas is himself being investigated for “insulting Turkishness”—just as Dink once was.

    From the print edition: Europe

    via Freedom of speech in Turkey: A secularist’s lament | The Economist.

  • Iran MP censures Turkey for crackdown on journalists

    Iran MP censures Turkey for crackdown on journalists

    The spokesman for Iran Majlis (parliament) Judicial and Legal Committee has criticized the government of Turkey for its harsh crackdown on journalists.

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    “Although some journalists in Turkey have leveled criticism against the ruling system of the country, they cannot be suppressed on [the unsubstantiated] charges of being terrorists,” Mohammad Ali Esfanani said Sunday.

    The lawmaker said there are 450 cases of freedom of speech violations in Turkey at the European Court of Human Rights which indicates the lack of freedom of expression in that country.

    Stressing that the Turkish government should respect the rights of its people, the lawmaker said, “Supporting journalists and freedom of speech is supporting democracy, and the Ankara government should take steps in the direction of respecting the rights of journalists and reporters.”

    On February 5, Secretary-General of the Council of Europe Thorbjoern Jagland called on Turkey to reconsider its anti-terrorism laws under which many journalists have been put behind bars.

    “They have laws, the terrorist act for instance, special courts, and they have a very wide interpretation of what incitement to violence is, which brings so many journalists to jail,” said Jagland. “This practice and laws have a clear, chilling effect. Journalists are afraid of doing their job because they are afraid of being detained.”

    Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erodgan, who has been in power since 2002, has been often accused of stifling the media and smothering opposition.

    Anti-terrorism laws allow suspects to be detained for lengthy periods before being formally charged.

    According to the media watchdog Reporters Sans Frontieres (RSF), some 70 journalists are currently languishing in Turkish jails. Turkey slipped to 154th out of 179 countries in the RSF press freedom index for 2013.

    KA/HGH/SS

    via PressTV – Iran MP censures Turkey for crackdown on journalists.

  • Turkey Plans to Lift Bans on Hundreds of Publications – NYTimes.com

    Turkey Plans to Lift Bans on Hundreds of Publications – NYTimes.com

    By SUSANNE GÜSTEN

    Published: December 12, 2012

    ISTANBUL — In a collection of essays published in 1959, the writer Aziz Nesin made an apparently anodyne declaration: “Socialism is ethical,” he wrote.

    Unfortunately for Mr. Nesin, a typesetter’s error turned the Turkish word “ahlak” into “allah,” resulting in the pronouncement that “socialism is God.” Half a century later, the book remained officially banned, as the trustees of his estate found to their surprise a couple of years ago, when a dozen copies were confiscated at the airport.

    “They were seized from the luggage of a colleague who was traveling abroad and had taken them along as gifts for friends,” Suleyman Cihangiroglu, director of the Nesin Foundation, said in an interview in Istanbul this week.

    The book, it emerged in heated discussion with security officials at the airport, still figures on a list of nearly 2,000 publications that are officially banned in Turkey by half-forgotten orders of various courts, ministries, emergency rule officials and other institutions.

    via Turkey Plans to Lift Bans on Hundreds of Publications – NYTimes.com.

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  • In Turkey the right to free speech is being lost

    In Turkey the right to free speech is being lost

    Erdogan is using a series of alleged plots to justify a crackdown on dissent that threatens basic freedoms

    Mehdi Hasan
    guardian.co.uk,

    erdogan 008
    Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s prime minister, has been described as ‘Putinesque’ by critics. Photograph: Nikolay Doychinov/AFP/Getty Images

    Which country in the world currently imprisons more journalists than any other? The People’s Republic of China? Nope. Iran? Wrong again. The rather depressing answer is the Republic of Turkey, where nearly 100 journalists are behind bars, according to the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe. Yes, that’s right: modern, secular, western-oriented Turkey, with its democratically elected government, has locked away more members of the press than China and Iran combined.

    But this isn’t just about the press – students, academics, artists and opposition MPs have all recently been targeted for daring to speak out against the government of prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his mildly Islamist Justice and Development Party, or AKP.

    There is a new climate of fear in Istanbul. When I visited the city last week to host a discussion show for al-Jazeera English, I found journalists speaking in hushed tones about the clampdown on free speech. Within 24 hours of our arrival, one of my al-Jazeera colleagues was detained by police officers, who went through his bag and rifled through one of my scripts. They loudly objected to a line referring to the country’s “increasingly authoritarian government”. Who says that Turks don’t do irony?

    The stock response from members of the AKP government is to blame the imprisonment and intimidation on Turkey’s supposedly “independent” judiciary. But this will not do. For a start, ministers haven’t been afraid of interfering in high-profile prosecutions. In a speech at – of all places – the Council of Europe in April 2011, a defiant Erdogan, commenting on the controversial detention of the investigative journalist Ahmet Sik, compared Sik’s then unpublished book to a bomb: “It is a crime to use a bomb, but it is also a crime to use materials from which a bomb is made.”

    Then there is the behind-the-scenes pressure that is exerted by the government on media organisations. “People are afraid of criticising Erdogan openly,” says Mehmet Karli, a lecturer at Galatasaray University in Istanbul and a campaigner for Kurdish rights. “They might not be arrested, but they will lose their jobs.”

    In February, for example, Nuray Mert, a columnist for the Milliyet newspaper, was sacked and her TV show cancelled after she was publicly singled out for criticism by the prime minister. Last month Ali Akel, a conservative columnist for the pro-government newspaper Yeni Safak, was fired for daring to write a rare, critical article about Erdogan’s handling of the Kurdish issue.

    But the restrictions on freedom of speech don’t stop with the media.

    Exhibit A: last week, two students were sentenced to eight years and five months in prison by a court in Istanbul for “membership of a terrorist organisation”, while a third student was sentenced to two years and two months behind bars for spreading terrorist propaganda. Yet the students, Berna Yilmaz, Ferhat Tüzer and Utku Aykar, had merely unfurled a banner reading “We want free education, we will get it,” at a public meeting attended by Erdogan in March 2010.

    Exhibit B: on 1 June Fazil Say, one of Turkey’s leading classical pianists, was charged with “publicly insulting religious values that are adopted by a part of the nation” after he retweeted a few lines from a poem by the 11th-century Persian poet, Omar Khayyam, that mocked the Islamic vision of heaven. Say’s trial is scheduled for October, and if convicted the pianist faces up to 18 months in prison. The irony is not lost on those Turks who remember how Erdogan himself was imprisoned in 1998, when he was mayor of Istanbul, for reading out a provocative poem.

    Erdogan, re-elected as prime minister for the second time last June and now considered the most powerful Turkish leader since Kemal Ataturk, has become intolerant of criticism and seems bent on crushing domestic opposition.

    “He is Putinesque,” says Karli, referring to reports that Erdogan plans to emulate the Russian leader’s switch from prime minister to president and thereby become the longest-serving leader in Turkish history. “Yes, he wins elections,” adds Karli, “but he does not respect the rights of those who do not vote or support him.”

    Let’s be clear: Turkey in the pre-Erdogan era was no liberal democratic nirvana. Since its creation in 1923, the republic has had to endure three military coups against elected governments: in 1960, 1971, and 1980. The AKP government is the first to succeed in neutering the military. And its paranoia is not wholly unjustified: Turkey’s constitutional court was just one vote from banning the AKP in 2008, and a series of alleged anti-government plots and conspiracies were exposed in 2010 and 2011.

    “I am concerned by the numbers [of imprisoned journalists] but they’re not all innocent,” the AKP MP Nursuna Memecan tells me. “Many of them were plotting against the government.” It’s a line echoed by her party leader. “It is hard for western countries to understand the problem because they do not have journalists who engage in coup attempts and who support and invite coups,” declared Erdogan in a speech in January.

    Perhaps. But the AKP’s crackdown on dissent, on basic freedoms of speech and expression, has gone beyond all civilised norms. “We do need to expand free speech in Turkey,” admits Memecan.

    Those of us who have long argued that elected Islamist parties should not be denied the opportunity to govern invested great hope in Erdogan and the AKP. But what I discovered in Istanbul is that there is still a long way to go. The truth is that Turkey cannot be the model, the template, for post-revolutionary, Muslim-majority countries like Tunisia and Egypt until it first gets its own house in order. To inspire freedom abroad, the Turkish government must first guarantee freedom at home.

  • Turkey’s Scientists Stripped of Autonomy as Ruling Party Extends Power

    Turkey’s Scientists Stripped of Autonomy as Ruling Party Extends Power

     


    While the AKP has certainly become more outspoken about its intent to assert influence over Turkey’s academic institutions, it has been doing so behind the scenes for several years now.

    Julia HARTE

    İstanbul – BİA News Center

    03 April 2012, Tuesday

    smoke

    Two years ago, a scientist named Onur Hamzaoğlu began finding arsenic, mercury and lead in the women and children who live in Turkey’s Kocaeli Province, the country’s second biggest industrial zone.

    Hamzaoğlu, the head of the public health department at the local university, encountered these heavy metals in infants’ feces and mothers’ breast milk in the course of a three-year research project that began in 2009 and will end later this year.

    When he told a journalist about his findings in early 2011, however, Hamzaoğlu triggered a government campaign aimed at discrediting him and his research.

    The mayor of Kocaeli, a member of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) dismissed Hamzaoğlu as a “charlatan” in the media, and sued for Hamzaoğlu’s imprisonment on the grounds that he was “inciting fear and panic in the public”. Turkey’s Ministry of Health sent a similar complaint to the AKP-controlled Council of Higher Education, provoking Kocaeli University’s president to launch disciplinary and ethical investigations against him.

    On March 15, Kocaeli’s Basic Criminal Court awarded Hamzaoğlu and his supporters a small victory. For insulting Hamzaoğlu in the media, the Kocaeli mayor will have to pay a fine of approximately $2,000.

    If the mayor wins his suit, however, Hamzaoğlu could still face up to four years in jail for going public with his research. Hamzaoğlu’s employer, Kocaeli University, will have to give permission before he can face the criminal trial that could result in his imprisonment.

    In most countries with advanced systems of higher education, he wouldn’t need to worry about his university selling him out that way. But in Turkey, Hamzaoğlu says, “Politicians in local governments and the Council of Higher Education put pressure on universities,” preventing scientists from exercising full academic freedom.

    Hamzaoğlu’s case is just one instance of political interests trumping scientific integrity. But a larger shadow of government intervention is creeping over Turkey’s entire scientific community.

    *

    Surrounded by the smell of fresh paint and the echo of still-empty office space, Mehmet Ali Alpar explains why he and 66 others resigned from Turkey’s twenty-year-old national science academy (TÜBA) in November, and helped found an alternate academy, the BA, whose headquarters we are now sitting in.

    “The government’s perception was that TÜBA was prejudiced,” says Alpar, who was part of TÜBA’s first assembly in 1993 and now chairs BA.

    The AKP, which is the most religious of Turkey’s major political parties, was uneasy with TÜBA’s wholehearted endorsement of Darwinian evolution, Alpar suspects.

    “All members of TÜBA, like scientists anywhere, are not creationists,” explains Alpar. “I suspect this is a reason for the government seeing us as biased. The dangerous step is when the politicians say, ‘Well, since we won a majority in the elections, we can decide on all issues, including scientific issues.’”

    That’s what happened to TÜBA last autumn. Using a controversial procedure for making “law by decree”, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan‘s cabinet issued two decrees fundamentally altering the structure of TÜBA.

    Rather than appoint its own members internally – established practice in every other international science academy – two-thirds of TÜBA’s membership would henceforth be candidates selected by two government bodies: the Council of Higher Education (YÖK) and the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK).

    Nearly half of TÜBA’s 138 members resigned in protest.

    “Before the decrees were announced, TÜBA was never consulted, and nobody ever asked for any information from TÜBA,” says Yücel Kanpolat, the president of TÜBA and a former professor of neurosurgery at Ankara University.

    “Myself and the remaining members are all waiting, hoping that the government will finally understand its mistake and take a step toward reversing the new procedure.”

    But many former TÜBA members don’t share Kanpolat’s optimism. At the end of February, Alpar says, he learned that universities had already been asked to nominate TÜBA member candidates for YÖK’s consideration. Neither YÖK, TÜBİTAK nor the Ministry of Science, Industry and Technology returned calls for comment on this article.

    Shortly after stepping down from TÜBA, Alpar and sixteen of the academy’s other former members founded the BA. Now 52 members strong, the new academy received a one-year donation of free office space from Turkish businessman Izzettin Silier, and has already started a conference series and begun planning educational initiatives.

    *

    “We want to raise religious youth. Do you expect the conservative democrat AK Party to raise an atheist generation? That might be your business, your mission, but not ours,” said Prime Minister Erdoğan in a parliamentary address at the beginning of February.

    While the AKP has certainly become more outspoken about its intent to assert influence over Turkey’s academic institutions, it has been doing so behind the scenes for several years now.

    YÖK itself was a fiercely secular institution until 2007, when Turkish President Abdullah Gül appointed a new president from the AKP’s ranks to bring YÖK’s aims and activities in line with AKP ideology. In the same year, Gül appointed a new president to TÜBİTAK, and the next year, the government amended the charter of formerly autonomous TÜBİTAK so that Erdoğan would select half of its 14-member board.

    In 2009, as TÜBİTAK’s magazine was preparing to release an issue centered around the 200-year anniversary of Darwin’s birth, the cover story on Darwin was pulled at the last minute and the magazine’s chief editor fired.

    “The way that TÜBİTAK has been increasingly brought under the control of the AKP is emblematic of the way that the AKP and the bureaucracy have become increasingly interwoven,” says Howard Eissenstat, a professor of Middle Eastern Studies at St. Lawrence University and Amnesty International’s Turkey specialist.

    The degree to which the AKP has now become synonymous with the Turkish state hasn’t been seen since the Turkish Democrat Party enjoyed single-party power in the 1950s, according to Eissenstat. In the half century following the Democrat Party’s fall from power, a handful of parties wrangled for their place in Turkey’s government, each with a separate constituency to protect.

    “In a typical university, you used to have departments that were typically affiliated with one party or another,” says Eissenstat.

    But now, he explains, “we’re seeing more and more administrators who are sympathetic to the AKP, who see themselves as representatives of it, and they are making it difficult to do work and be promoted if you’re not following the party line.”

    Alpar agrees that the AKP’s effort to exert its influence over Turkey’s educational institutions highlights a deeper, more sinister trend.

    “This is part of a recent political climate in this country. It boils down to a mistaken interpretation of what democracy is. Democracy doesn’t say that a majority vote gives the government infinite wisdom and the mandate to decide on all technical matters.”

    *

    Since news first broke of the lawsuit and investigations against Hamzaoğlu, his situation has attracted considerable attention in Turkey and beyond. The International Association of Health Policy called for scientists around the world to sign a petition of support. Hamzaoğlu’s case was reported in The Times of London and mentioned in a recent post on The New York Times’s website.

    TÜBA has also received letters from science academies all over the world, expressing dismay at the change in its membership process.

    “A loss of autonomy would diminish [TÜBA’s] effectiveness, both within Turkey and the international scientific community,” wrote Ralph Cicerone, president of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, in an open letter to President Gül.

    Over the long term, sacrificing scientific integrity and academic freedom to the ruling party’s increasing need for control will ultimately make Turkey less competitive, says Eissenstat.

    “There are real costs to this sort of repression. There’s almost certainly going to be a greater brain drain in Turkey. There’s almost certainly going to be a drop in its scientific productivity.” (JH/HK)

     

     

  • Is the bill passed by the parliament a violation of the right to freedom of expression?

    Is the bill passed by the parliament a violation of the right to freedom of expression?

    ErmeniAccording to Mikael Danielyan, the chairman of the Helsinki Association, the bill banning the denial of genocides passed by the French parliament is a violation of the right to freedom of expression. He expressed such a notion during a conversation with Aravot.am. M. Danielyan thinks that it should not be in a form of a bill and aim at holding people accountable, “It is human’s right to freedom of expression to admit or not admit something. I am against such bills and I think that if someone denies, it should not be a subject of criminal responsibility. Human’s right to freedom of expression remains higher.”

    Political scientist Stepan Grigoryan, the director of the Analytical Center on Globalization and Regional Cooperation, expressed an opposite idea during a conversation with us, “I don’t think that it can be perceived as a violation of the right to freedom of expression. Provided the Holocaust is recognized around the world, almost in every country the denial of the Holocaust is criminalized. It means that not recognizing or denying the Holocaust is punishable. It has nothing to do with restraining the human rights. It is obvious that people who deny that must be held accountable both internationally and in their own country. The fact of the Armenian Genocide is recognized by around 20 countries, also by EU, various international organizations, therefore that fact is well-known.”

    Let us mention that according to the Turkish Zaman newspaper, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan severely criticized the decision of the French Senate, “Unfortunately, all this was related to Sarkozy’s political ambitions. Now I ask is there a freedom of speech in France? And I answer no. They have destroyed the atmosphere of free debate.”

    He is convinced that the bill will be finally ratified, “President Sarkozy will not use the right to veto, and that bill passed by the Senate will be ratified and will finally become a law. If Nicolas Sarkozy had been against, the government of France would have actively worked with the members of the Senate in order that it wasn’t passed. It is obvious that there has been no pressure on the MPs imposed by the government, so we have no doubt that this law will be finally ratified.”

    In response to a question what impact would the passing of this bill have, S. Grigoryan said that Turkey’s first reaction would be painful, but eventually, that country would reconcile to the fact that France was a powerful country, a permanent member of the UN Security Council and messing with such a country would have serious repercussions. According to him, the political fuss may be big, by calling back the ambassador, the relations may transfer to the level of the ambassador’s deputy, but S. Grigoryan doesn’t think that France will suffer big losses in the field of economics. On the contrary, it is not ruled out that showing such an attitude, Turkey may face problems herself.

    Turkey has already stated about stopping military cooperation with France. As for imposing various sanctions by that country, the political scientist thinks that France doesn’t fear those steps, “Let us not forget that France is a powerful country herself. France is backed by EU. What is a sanction against France – e.g. if Turkey tries to impose some economic or commercial sanctions against France, she will automatically confront the European Union.”

    In response to our question whether the step of passing the bill by France was not conditioned by the fact that the country tried to attract the attention of the Armenian community during the upcoming election and thereby win votes, the political scientist noted that it was not the main factor, “There are roughly half a million Armenians in France, they have nearly 200 thousand votes. It is not such a big influence, so that to make France oppose Turkey.” According to the political scientist, France had a few reasons for passing that bill, one of which, according to him, was related to restoring historical justice and the main reason was, “Turkey has shown big ambitions in the Arab, Muslim world recently. Turkey tries to become a leader in the region in regard to the Arab Spring and revolutions, including the countries of North Africa. It is obvious that France doesn’t like it.” Our interlocutor thinks that passing the bill is not the last step taken by France against Turkey. In his words, the period of rivalry has just started, “Turkey is becoming more powerful and clashing with the interests of other countries, first of all France and Italy and there will be new steps taken by those countries in the short-run.”

    Lusine KHACHATRYAN

    www.aravot.am, DECEMBER 22, 2011