Tag: press freedom

Trying to get at the truth of Turkey’s jailed journalists | Media | guardian.co.uk

Trying to get at the truth of Turkey’s jailed journalists

Turkey is regarded as having a dire press freedom record. But the facts – even the numbers – are disputed.

First, the numbers. According to the Turkish Journalists’ Union and the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), the country currently has 72 journalists in jail.

Turkey’s ministry of justice, which disputes the unions’ list, says that only 63 of the named people were jailed and that the overwhelming majority of them were sentenced on charges that “had nothing to do with the conduct of journalism.”

Doubtless, the ministry will also take issue with figures that appear in an Index on Censorship piece by Ece Temelkuran in which she writes:

“Today in Turkey, there are more than 100 journalists, over 500 students and more than 3,500 Kurdish and Turkish politicians who have been subjected to political trials and imprisoned for months or even years.”

OK, so the figures are a problem. Now for the competing analyses.

The ministry asserts that of 63 people on the list, 36 were indicted and 18 of them were sentenced, while the rest “are still under legal investigation.”

Yavuz Baydar, a columnist with Today’s Zaman, takes up the ministry’s assessment in Myths and facts about journalists. He writes:

“I went through the list; 30 of the 36 were either sentenced or indicted for either membership in the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) – a big majority – or illegal leftist groups such as the Turkish Workers’ and Peasants’ Liberation Army (TIKKO) or the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party (MLKP) or aiding/abetting these.

The remaining six are accused of being members of Ergenekon, the alleged illegal terror network.”

In noting that the investigative journalists Nedim Şener and Ahmet Şık are not listed, he points out that they are “cases of shame” because they are “symbols for free opinion” as are some of the jailed Kurdish editors and publishers.

Temelkuran is also exercised by the Sener and Şık arrests on charges of “causing political chaos through media.”

Both are accused of being members of Ergenekon, which they have been investigating for years. The government argues, however, that they are using their journalism as a cover for their own “terrorist” identity.

Temelkuran’s concern is that the case is not being reported by the Turkish media despite “the inadequacy and absurdity of the indictment that caused constant laughter in the court.”

By contrast, it was on the front page of the New York Times, Charges against journalists dim the democratic glow in Turkey.

Şık has been in prison, on remand in solitary, for 11 months for writing a book which alleged that Turkish security forces were involved in the 2007 murder of the Turkish-Armenian newspaper editor, Hrant Dink.

Temelkuran writes: “These political arrests and the silence surrounding them has degraded the status of press freedom in Turkey.”

Baydar may distance himself from some of Temelkuran’s views but he does believe “freedom of expression/media will remain a big headache for Turkey.”

In demanding fairness and rigour, he argues that jailings have to assessed on a case-by-cases basis “to determine if they have deliberately crossed the fine line between freedom of expression and hate speech or of being on the side of political violence.”

Sources: The Economist/Index on Censorship/Today’s Zaman/New York Times

Posted by

Roy Greenslade

via Trying to get at the truth of Turkey’s jailed journalists | Media | guardian.co.uk.

January 10, 2012
Phone-hacking justice doesn’t have to equal journalists in jail

Peter Preston
The Observer

An Istanbul columnist may be too bold to draw parallels between Turkish reporters in prison and those arrested for hacking in the UK, but his analogy still has resonance for the Leveson inquiry

Lord Justice Leveson, centre, at the start of his inquiry into the culture, practice and ethics of the press. Photograph: Getty

Here’s an honest mistake from far away that sends chill winds blowing up Fleet Street and rattling the door on Lord Justice Leveson’s inquiry. A good and respected Turkish columnist – Yavuz Baydar, who writes for Today’s Zaman in Istanbul – is fighting back against human rights judges in Strasbourg who say that Ankara has “the worst press freedom record” in the 47-nation strong Council of Europe. But 64 journalists in prison, maybe even 72 … who can argue with that? Anyone with a wider perspective, Baydar declares.

“There are, at the moment, around 16 journalists in jail in Great Britain, under arrest pending trial in the so-called News of the World phone-hacking scandal. They are accused of breaching the law, and their conduct is under scrutiny by ethical rules as well. But some claim no wrongdoing, saying this was journalism in the public interest. So far I haven’t seen any protest from their colleagues that ‘the freedom of the media in the UK is in danger’.”

Watch this space, Yavuz. But grow reflective while you do. How many Operation Weeting arrests – present and future – do journalists and politicians, trawling through the dead ashes of the News of the World, actually want turned to jail sentences?

If a whole newsroom was hacking, does that mean 28 reporters going down? If Richard Thomas, the former information commissioner, had got his wish and long since persuaded the government to make the blagging of information a custodial offence under the Data Protection Act, would Fleet Street – or any other street where media men and women live – have been dancing with glee? A month in the clink for excavating ex-directory telephone numbers? Even Turkey might raise an eyebrow over that.

via Phone-hacking justice doesn’t have to equal journalists in jail | Media | The Observer.

January 8, 2012
EU commission to confront Turkey on free press

By Andrew Rettman

The European Commission in its annual enlargement report will tell Turkey to stop attacking investigative journalists and to back off on Cyprus gas exploration.

)”]The report, due to be published on Wednesday (12 October) and seen by EUobserver, singles out Turkey in a general complaint about attempts to gag independent reporting in the Western Balkans, saying: “In Turkey, the legal framework does not yet sufficiently safeguard freedom of expression. A very high number of cases are brought against journalists and the number of journalists in detention is a concern.”

In the chapter dealing with Turkey, it notes: “While substantial progress has been made over the past 10 years, significant efforts are required to guarantee fundamental rights in practice, in particular freedom of expression.”

With Ankara recently sending gunboats to accompany a Turkish ship drilling for gas in waters claimed by EU member state Cyprus, it “also urges the avoidance of any kind of threat, source of friction or action that could damage good neighbourly relations.”

Turkish reporters writing about sensitive issues, such as state links to underground Islamist movements, Kurdish minority rights and the 1915 Armenian genocide, face prosecution and jail sentences under anti-terrorism laws in actions that undermine the country’s image as a model Islamic democracy.

Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based NGO, in a survey earlier this year noted that 60 journalists are in prison while 62 were tried in media freedom cases in the first three months of this year.

Reporters Ahmet Sik and Nedim Seder have spent six months in prison for looking into the Energekon case, the government’s hunt-down of people allegedly linked to an ultra-nationalist cabal run by military officers. Authorities have also seized unpublished copies of Sik’s book on the subject, The Army of the Imam, and made it a criminal offence to keep electronic versions of the manuscript on a computer hard drive.

Reporters Vedat Yildiz and Lokman Dayan in March received eight-year suspended sentences for covering a pro-Kurdish demonstration in southeast Turkey. Meanwhile, the decision in September to wrap up the investigation into the 2007 murder of pro-Armenian writer Hrant Dink is widely seen as an attempt to portray his young killer, Ogun Samast, as a ‘lone wolf’ extremist while making sure suspected links to government officials are not explored.

On Western Balkans enlargement, the draft European Commission report does not say whether Brussels will recommend that Serbia gets formal EU candidate status.

The decision is to be taken by the college of commissioners at the last minute before it is published on Wednesday amid attempts to pressure Belgrade to normalise day-to-day relations with Kosovo.

EUobserver has learned the commission will on Wednesday recommend giving the status as a reward for Serbia handing over top war crimes fugitives Ratko Mladic and Goran Hadzic to The Hague. But the award will be made on the understanding Germany will in December block an EU decision to start accession talks with Serbia due to its support for ethnic Serb paramiltary groups and gangsters in north Kosovo.

Looking at the other Balkan EU aspirants, the report confirms that Croatia “should” be able to join the EU on 1 July 2013 and holds up Zagreb as “an incentive and catalyst [for pro-EU reforms] for the rest of the region.” But it adds EU officials will send special missions to monitor its fight against high-level corruption and publish six-monthly reports in the run-up to enlargement in a mechanism that could see Brussels recommend EU countries put the accession process on hold.

Montenegro and Macedonia come top of the class in terms of progress on reforms. But the commission does not say when the two EU candidates can start accession talks. Albania is said to have made “limited progress” amid a political deadlock over January’s elections. Bosnia is described as being in a state of “paralysis and confrontation” between ethnic Serbs and Muslims with “lack of a common understanding on the overall direction and future of the country.”

The two special cases in the report – Iceland and Kosovo – stand poles apart.

The commission notes that Iceland is more or less already an EU country in terms of standards and that accession talks are making “headway.” But it notes that joining the EU “remains a controversial issue” amid widespread belief Icelanders will reject the union when it comes to a referendum on membership.

Kosovo, which has no prospects of joining the EU until all 27 member states recognise it as a country, is depicted as an economic and security basket case. The report notes that unemployment in the former Serb province is the highest in Europe and that “much more needs to be done to tackle organised crime and corruption.”

It adds that Brussels “takes very seriously” allegations that its prime minister, Hashim Thaci, ran an organised crime group 10 years ago that cut out and sold the internal organs of Serb prisoners and that continues to threaten the lives of potential witnesses in EU attempts to investigate the case today.

via EUobserver.com / Enlargement / EU commission to confront Turkey on free press.

October 11, 2011
Freedom of the press getting plucked in Turkey

It was a coincidence that Turkey’s president, Abdullah Gul, received this year’s Chatham House prize from Britain’s queen in London on Nov. 9 only hours after the European Commission released its annual report on Turkey’s progress toward the European Union. The timing threw a harsh light on Brussels’ criticisms, but Gul batted them off. As usual, the EU demanded that Turkey open its ports and airports to Greek-Cypriots. But Gul rejected any idea of a unilateral Turkish concession. The EU has not lifted the isolation of Turkish-Cypriots, despite its promise to do so in 2004, he said. Quietly, his British hosts agreed that more concessions should come from the Greek-Cypriots.

The EU talks are barely moving, because so many chapters are blocked by Cyprus or by other EU countries. Gul told The Economist that Turkey would pursue the reforms to join even if most of the chapters remained closed, and added that it was possible Turks might end up rejecting membership anyway. Yet he disputed claims that Turkey was turning away from the West, observing that these were often designed merely to exert “psychological pressure.” Turkey is confident that, if it goes along with America’s missile-defense system, it will be back in the West’s good books despite its harsh criticisms of Israel and soft treatment of Iran.

There were some more positive passages in the commission’s report. It cited somewhat better treatment of religious minorities, the easing of restrictions on Kurdish-language broadcasting, improvements to the penal code, new constitutional measures to increase civilian control over the army and an acceptance of Armenian-language textbooks in schools.

But the commission was highly critical of the way Turkey treats its press. As many as 40 journalists are in jail awaiting trial or having been convicted. Several newspapers have sacked columnists who have been too critical of the ruling Justice and Development Party, or AK, of the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The commission repeats its worries about assaults by the tax authorities on Turkey’s biggest media conglomerate, the Dogan group, which began only after its reporters started digging into corruption among AK members. Many prominent journalists confess that they now practise self-censorship for fear of offending Erdogan.

Yet Gul largely rejects these concerns. He insists that freedom of the press is a cornerstone of Turkish democracy and declares that “everybody is free to write what they want.” He has promised to look at legal or even constitutional amendments that might improve the protection of journalists, but he says that most cases concerned leaks or the abuse of court-privileged information.

Others are not convinced. Reporters without Borders, a lobby group, ranks Turkey 138th of 178 countries for press freedom in 2010, the lowest in a decade. William Horsley of the Association of European Journalists frets about an increasingly restrictive climate. A group of journalists demonstrated in Ankara recently and sent a letter of protest to Erdogan demanding reforms. At a conference in early October, Ercan Ipekci, a Turkish editor, listed 27 articles in the penal code that are used to harass reporters and said Turkey risked becoming a dictatorship.

The AK party’s opponents share these criticisms. Karen Fogg, a former EU ambassador in Turkey, says the commission report “provides an interesting political agenda for the opposition.” Kemal Kilicdaroglu, leader of the centre-left Republican People’s Party has consolidated his control over his party. He may yet stop the AK party winning next June’s election outright. In any case Turkey needs to do more to get a better report next time.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition November 13, 2010 A19

November 14, 2010
Turkish media silence on EU’s press freedom remarks troubling, experts say

ÖZGÜR ÖĞRET

ISTANBUL – Hürriyet Daily News

'This star will go very well here,' says a billboard slogan, showing blended Turkish and EU flags in Ankara in this file photo. Hürriyet photo

The deafening silence in the media in response to a leaked copy of the EU’s annual Progress Report on Turkey is a sign of waning interest in the European Union among the Turkish public. Experts say it is worrying that media outlets did not make more noise regarding the report’s criticisms of the lack of press freedom in the country

‘This star will go very well here,’ says a billboard slogan, showing blended Turkish and EU flags in Ankara in this file photo. Hürriyet photo

The Turkish media’s muted coverage of this year’s EU Progress Report on Turkey suggests people are losing interest, experts said Monday, adding that the failure to highlight the report’s criticisms of the lack of press freedom is very worrying.

“Unfortunately, nobody takes the EU [accession] process seriously anymore,” Ferai Tınç, a columnist for daily Hürriyet, told the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review.

The annual EU accession progress reports used to provide headline material for the Turkish press, but most media outlets failed to devote much coverage to the latest report, which was leaked to press this weekend ahead of its official release Tuesday.

EU expert Can Baydarol, a scholar from Istanbul Kültür University, told the Daily News that the public was tired of both the slow pace of progress and the attitude of countries like Germany and France, who have repeatedly stressed their opposition to Turkey’s membership in the bloc.

“A conclusion in the news makes readers happy. Here, there is a years-long process with no end in sight,” Associate Professor Aslı Tunç of Bilgi University’s School of Communications, told the Daily News.

According to a recent survey by the U.S. German Marshall Fund, covered by private TV channel CNNTürk in September, Turkish citizens in favor of EU membership dropped from 48 to 38 percent over the previous year, while the rate of people against it rose from 22 to 31 percent.

The number of people who said EU membership would be “neither good nor bad” was 20 percent while 11 percent of the participants offered no comment.

The same survey reported that only 26 percent of Turks believe the country will ever join the EU. The year before the rate was 32 percent.

Lack of coverage on press freedom issue a cause for concern

While there are logical reasons for the lack of coverage, the experts expressed worry about the lack of attention to the report’s criticisms of press freedom in Turkey.

Press freedom is being perceived very narrowly as limited merely to the YouTube ban, Tunç said.

“The actual problem is much deeper, but contemporary newspapers cannot question it,” she said, adding that the economic nature of the Turkish newspaper business makes them dependent on the government, thus depriving them of their independence.

Other than some Internet sources, there were few institutions that could objectively evaluate the media itself, Tunç said.

Moreover, the press’ failure to highlight the report’s findings and protect their trial-weary staff is little surprise, she said.

“When do [the newspapers] protect [their staff]?” she asked. “They do not protect them in terms of job safety, life quality or life security. They are not protected at all.”

It is regrettable that newspapers have failed to protect their reporters, according to Tunç.

Tınç, meanwhile, said the press merely wanted to refrain from criticizing the government out of “fear of being oppositional.”

Deniz Ergürel, secretary-general of the Media Association, which is currently preparing its own report on journalists who are on trial for their reporting, said it was unfortunate that the Turkish press was failing to take protect its own interests.

“We, as the press, report the problems of everybody but our own. However, they should be voiced loudly,” he said, adding that Justice Minister Sadullah Ergin recently visited their association and responded positively when the group shared its concerns.

Even when they do show interest, Turkish newspapers are also guilty of either displaying all praise and no criticism or vice versa on certain subjects depending on the level of support they have for the government, according to the experts.

As such, different media outlets might cover the same EU report with headlines such as “EU praises developments” and “EU unsatisfied with developments.”

“These reports are not written to pat Turkey on the back and say bravo,” Baydarol said.

Tunç, meanwhile, said it was merely another example of the press’ polarization in Turkey, adding that it was undesirable that readers be offered only one opinion in a news story.

November 11, 2010
Turkish media comes under legal pressure

By CHRISTOPHER TORCHIA and EROL ISRAFIL

ISTANBUL

These days, Busra Erdal wears two hats on her trips to Turkish courts. She writes for a newspaper, mainly about the trials of suspected coup plotters. And she defends herself — in about 60 cases that claim she broke confidentiality codes and other laws in her stories.

It’s a tale of modern Turkey, a democracy with authoritarian roots, and an Islamic-leaning government in a power struggle with secular elites linked to the military and judiciary. It’s about limits on expression in a nation seeking to join the European Union, and a combative culture in which media groups slide into the political fray, by design or default.

“Thoughts constantly circle in my head. What if I go to jail? Why am I doing this job?” Erdal, 29, said in a rapid but low-key tone during an interview in an Istanbul cafe.

Over the past year, there has been an upswing in cases filed by state prosecutors against Turkish media, many related to trials of alleged networks of hardline secularists, including police and military officers, suspected of conspiring against Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The legal flurry comes amid tension between the government and the judicial establishment, both of which have sparred with their media critics, which in turn benefit from leaks by inside sources that possibly have a political agenda.

via Turkish media comes under legal pressure – BusinessWeek.

October 27, 2010