Police raided the Istanbul offices of LeMan Monday evening and detained the staff members after the publication of what officials claimed was a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad, a depiction that is forbidden in the Muslim world. At the same time, a mob laid siege to the building and the surrounding area in Beyoğlu District, chanting pro-shariah law slogans. 

Istanbul prosecutors are investigating six people from the LeMan staff for “publicly demeaning religious values.” Four of the staffers are in custody and two others are wanted but are reportedly not in the country. 

The cartoon, published in the latest edition of the weekly, depicts two men with wings on their backs meeting over the skies of a city being bombed. They greet each other by saying “Assalamu alaikum, I’m Muhammad,” and “Aleichem shalom, I’m Moses,” as they shake hands. LeMan said on X that the man in the cartoon is not the prophet but instead a Muslim man named Muhammad. 

“Turkish authorities shouldn’t fan the flames of religious backlash over a cartoon that LeMan magazine said was not portraying the Islamic prophet,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “The authorities should release the four LeMan staff in custody, cancel the warrants for those abroad, and focus on ensuring their safety.”

Prior depictions of the Prophet Muhammad in cartoons have led to lethal violence and death threats against journalists.

The detained include Doğan Pehlivan, the cartoonist; Cebrail Okçu, graphic designer; Zafer Aknar, news editor; and Ali Yavuz, institutional manager. Tuncay Akgün, the chief editor and publisher, and news editor Aslan Özdemir were also wanted by the authorities. 

Turkish authorities banned the distribution of the latest edition of LeMan and ordered copies to be pulled from newsstands. A court ordered that LeMan’s website and X account be blocked within Turkey.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Turkey’s cabinet members welcomed the operation in public comments. Some opposition leaders also criticized the cartoon. 

CPJ’s emailed request for comment from the chief prosecutor’s office in Istanbul did not receive a reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

“Fatih Altaylı’s arrest is a blatant attempt to intimidate an influential commentator into self-censorship,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “Authorities should immediately release Altaylı, stop targeting critical voices, and allow journalists to do their job without fear of reprisal.” 

On June 20, Altaylı—who regularly shares content to his 1.5 million YouTube subscribers and 2.8 million X followers—commented on a public poll in which 70% of Turkish voters indicated that they preferred to vote for another leader after Erdoğan, who won’t be eligible to run in the country’s 2028 elections due to a two-term limit. In his commentary, Altaylı said the Turkish people “love the ballot box” and wouldn’t want to abandon the right to determine their own future. He added, “This nation is a nation that strangled their sultan when they didn’t like things; didn’t want him. A nation that booed their sultan.”

In his testimony to the authorities, Altaylı said he didn’t threaten the president but merely voiced well known historical facts, and his comments meant to underline how the Turkish people value democracy. 

On Monday, a video of an empty chair was uploaded to Altaylı’s channel in protest of his arrest, which has been viewed more than 788,000 times. 

CPJ’s emailed request for comment on Altaylı’s arrest from the chief prosecutor’s office in Istanbul did not receive a reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

“The prosecution of Öznur Değer is yet another example of the witch hunt against critical journalists in Turkey. Reporting on sensitive issues does not equate with promoting violence,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “Turkish authorities should quickly free Değer, drop the charge against her, and put an end to such vindictive prosecutions.”

Değer, news director for the pro-Kurdish site JİNNEWS, was taken into police custody during a February 7 raid on her home in the southeastern city of Mardin and put under arrest by a court.

The court subsequently charged her with making propaganda for the PKK, which Turkey recognizes as a terrorist organization.

The PKK, which has been fighting Turkish security forces since 1984, announced in May that it was planning to disband as part of a new peace process.

In the four-page indictment, reviewed by CPJ, prosecutors said PKK-related news, photographs, and videos that Değer posted on the social media platform X between 2021 and 2024 were terrorism propaganda.

The indictment also said Değer was under investigation for “insulting a public officer,” who filed a complaint about comments Değer made at a funeral wake in December.

Değer is appealing a six year and three month sentence issued against her and seven other journalists in June 2024 for membership of a terrorist organization. She spent almost seven months in jail, from October 2022 to May 2023, awaiting trial.

CPJ’s email requesting comment from the chief prosecutor’s office in Mardin did not receive a reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

“Turkish authorities in Ankara must take the threats made against journalist İsmail Arı and his relatives seriously and take decisive steps to better ensure their safety,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “The authorities should swiftly and comprehensively investigate the threats and hold those responsible to account, so all journalists in Turkey can safely do their jobs.”

Arı, based in the capital Ankara, said in a post on X that he filed a criminal complaint on May 16 notifying authorities that he was insulted, threatened and sent a list of his relatives via messaging app by an unknown foreign number earlier in the day, and at least one of his relatives was threatened in a phone call, according to the complaint reviewed CPJ.

Arı told CPJ via messaging app on Monday that the police provided a “caution protection” number for him to call and report incidents for 90 days. The journalist also contacted the Interior Ministry about the matter but did not receive a reply as of Monday evening.

Arı was previously targeted with death threats in late 2023 in connection with his reporting on an Islamist group in southern Turkey.

CPJ’s emailed request for comment to Turkey’s Interior Ministry, which oversees the police, did not receive a reply. 

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

Later Thursday, an Istanbul court arrested Karabay, pending trial, on suspicion of “making targets of those who were tasked to combat terrorism” and “insulting” Turkish President Recep Tayyip. The arrest order, which CPJ reviewed, cites the journalist’s social media posts in April about the prosecution of Ekrem İmamoğlu, the arrested opposition mayor of Istanbul, according to the arrest order.

Karabay’s posts on X after March 21 have been deleted. CPJ couldn’t confirm when these posts were deleted or by whom. On May 16, his account on X was blocked in Turkey “in response to a legal demand.”

“Courts in Turkey keep arresting reporter Furkan Karabay on similar suspicions year after year, which points to a pattern of making him an example of due to his reporting,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “Turkish authorities should free Karabay without delay and end the chokehold they have on the flow of the news in the country.” 

In a separate trial last month, Karabay was found guilty of defamation and “insulting” Erdoğan. He received a delayed prison sentence of 25 months in total due to reporting on the main opposition party’s claims of corruption against the president’s family.

On November 9, 2024, an Istanbul court arrested Karabay, pending trial, on a similar charge of suspicion of “making targets of those who were tasked to combat terrorism,” “insulting a public servant,” and “knowingly distributing misleading information to the public,” due to reporting on the arrest of an opposition mayor. He was released on the next day, and that trial is yet to begin.

On December 28, 2023, another Istanbul court arrested Karabay on suspicion of “making targets of those who were tasked to combat terrorism,” as well as defamation, due to his reporting on allegations of corruption in the judiciary. He was released pending trial in January 2024, and acquitted from both charges in October.

Journalists in Turkey who report on members of the judiciary or judicial developments are frequently charged with “making targets of those who were tasked to combat terrorism.”

CPJ’s email to the Istanbul chief prosecutor’s office did not receive a reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

Akın said she received a threatening phone call a day before whistleblower Cemil Önal, her main source in the series, was murdered in the Netherlands on May 1, according to multiple reports. Önal, the former finance director for an alleged crime lord, made allegations of blackmail, extortion, bribery and money laundering against authorities in Turkey and Turkish occupied Cyprus.

“The urgency of securing journalist Ayşemden Akın’s safety could not be clearer after multiple death threats and the murder of her source,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “Turkish authorities in Northern Cyprus must take swift action to ensure Akın’s protection, investigate threats on her life and hold those responsible to account.”

On Wednesday, Akın told CPJ via messaging app that she has been offered a limited police protection service in response to the threats, with a police car being sent to surveil her home for about a half an hour every morning. Akın said police appeared to pull the service before it was later reinstated after she posted about it on X. 

Police chief Kasım Kuni told Turkish news site Kısa Dalga there had been no request for increased protection, but Cansu N. Nazlı, a lawyer for Akın, countered this denial with documents showing three separate requests. The matter was brought to the agenda of the parliament of the KKTC on Tuesday by the opposition, and government spokesperson Özdemir Berova said Akın will be “protected.” 

Akın is a citizen of the Turkish-occupied Northern Cyprus, whose 1976 declaration of independence as the Turkish Republic Of Northern Cyprus (KKTC) is only recognized by Turkey.

Turkey’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said they will take legal action against accusations in Akın’s reports in a statement.

CPJ emailed the Office of the Presidency in KKTC for comment but did not receive any reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

The journalists could be jailed for up to three years for violating the law on gatherings and demonstrations. In the indictment, reviewed by CPJ, prosecutors argue that the journalists were participating in an illegal meeting as protesters. Photographs in which their press credentials and cameras were not visible were submitted as evidence to support this charge.

“This trial has been invented as a scare tactic to intimidate and deter all journalists in Turkey from reporting from the field. Experienced journalists should not be forced to explain in court why they were photographing Turkey’s biggest protests in a decade, in its biggest city,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “Authorities should drop the charges against the five photojournalists who already suffer enough in trying to capture images of historic events while repeatedly being beaten, tear gassed and shot with rubber bullets.”

On March 24, Istanbul police raided the homes of Agence France-Presse’s Yasin Akgül, local NOW Haber TV channel’s Ali Onur Tosun, and freelancers Bülent Kılıç, Zeynep Kuray, and Hayri Tunç, as well as two photographers employed by local municipalities, Kuruluş Arı and Gökhan Kam.

All seven were arrested and then released on March 27, pending their April 18 trial.

Unrest broke out on March 19 following the detention of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, who is seen as a potential challenger to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

CPJ’s email to Istanbul’s chief prosecutor requesting comment did not receive a response.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

The journalists could be jailed for up to three years for violating the law on gatherings and demonstrations. In the indictment, reviewed by CPJ, prosecutors argue that the journalists were participating in an illegal meeting as protesters. Photographs in which their press credentials and cameras were not visible were submitted as evidence to support this charge.

“This trial has been invented as a scare tactic to intimidate and deter all journalists in Turkey from reporting from the field. Experienced journalists should not be forced to explain in court why they were photographing Turkey’s biggest protests in a decade, in its biggest city,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “Authorities should drop the charges against the five photojournalists who already suffer enough in trying to capture images of historic events while repeatedly being beaten, tear gassed and shot with rubber bullets.”

On March 24, Istanbul police raided the homes of Agence France-Presse’s Yasin Akgül, local NOW Haber TV channel’s Ali Onur Tosun, and freelancers Bülent Kılıç, Zeynep Kuray, and Hayri Tunç, as well as two photographers employed by local municipalities, Kuruluş Arı and Gökhan Kam.

All seven were arrested and then released on March 27, pending their April 18 trial.

Unrest broke out on March 19 following the detention of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, who is seen as a potential challenger to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

CPJ’s email to Istanbul’s chief prosecutor requesting comment did not receive a response.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

On March 19, police took Saymaz, a freelance journalist and TV commentator who formerly worked for pro-opposition critical outlets such as Halk TV and Sözcü, into custody in a raid on his home in Istanbul. A court placed him under house arrest on March 21 on the charge of “assisting an attempt to overthrow the government” during the 2013 nationwide protests.

“İsmail Saymaz is among the most well-known journalists in Turkey. Putting him under house arrest for attempting to overthrow the government 12 years ago can only be seen as an absurd attempt to prevent him from reporting,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “Turkish media should be able to provide reporting and commentary without fear of judicial retaliation.

Authorities’ plans in 2023 to redevelop Istanbul’s Gezi Park, triggered civil unrest across Turkey, which led to several people being killed and thousands injured during protests.

Saymaz’s lawyer said the journalist was questioned while in custody about his journalistic activity, contacts, and social media activity while reporting on the Gezi protests, including his communication with some of those convicted on charges of organizing the unrest, such as businessman Osman Kavala, lawyer Can Atalay, film producer Çiğdem Mater, and architect Mücella Yapıcı

Saymaz won an award for his reporting on the death of 19-year-old protester Ali Ismail Korkmaz in Gezi Park.

CPJ’s email to Istanbul’s chief prosecutor requesting comment did not receive a response.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

The law, passed on Wednesday, criminalizes reporting about an online data leak or sharing that report unless the authorities have confirmed the incident.

It imposes a prison sentence of two to five years for anyone who knowingly creates or spreads “false” content claiming that there is a cybersecurity data leak “in order to create anxiety, fear, and panic among the public, or to target institutions or individuals.”

“Turkey’s new cybersecurity law could not only stifle reporting on cybersecurity-related data leaks, but empowering the government to decide whether a leak actually occurred or not raises the risk of broader censorship,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “Turkish authorities should revise the law to ensure that it does not threaten to undermine press freedom.”

The law also establishes a new cybersecurity authority and cybersecurity commission, which have legal access to any kind of digital information stored in Turkey when approved by a court order. An earlier draft of the bill proposed giving the newly founded bodies this authority without a court order.

The law’s passage follows an admission by Turkey’s online authority BTK in September 2024 that the personal data of 108 million people had been stolen from government servers.

Turkey’s opposition parties are preparing to apply to the Constitutional Court for an annulment of the law.

In 2022, Turkey passed a law that criminalized “spreading disinformation,” which has persistently been used against the media. Turkish authorities briefly arrested reporter İbrahim Haskoloğlu in 2022 due to reporting on an alleged data leak.

CPJ emailed the Presidential Directorate of Communications for comment but received no reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

Güney, his Mezopotamya News Agency colleague Delal Akyüz, and Melike Aydın, a reporter with another pro-Kurdish outlet JİNNEWS were charged with membership in the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) which the government has designated a terrorist organization. In the indictments, which CPJ reviewed, authorities cited the three journalists’ work reporting on Kurdish issues, including phone calls with colleagues and books and magazines confiscated from their homes, as well as secret witness testimony alleging they work under the command of the PKK.

Journalists who work for pro-Kurdish media are at risk in Turkey and beyond. CPJ’s most recent prison census found that 10 Kurdish journalists in multiple countries were imprisoned for their work as of December 1, 2024. Akyüz and Aydın are both Kurds, members of a large ethnic minority that spans several countries in the Middle East.

In addition to visiting Güney at home, CPJ interviewed Aydın while she was under house arrest and spoke with Akyüz over the phone about the conditions of their confinement, their court cases, their views on self-censorship, and how they’ve continued to work from home. After our interviews, Aydın and Güney were released on February 10 while Akyüz was released on the 12th; the three remain under a travel ban while they continue to face charges. The interviews have been edited for length and style.

Delal Akyüz, reporter with Mezopotamya News Agency

Why are you under house arrest?

It may sound funny when I say it, but I don’t know the answer. I studied for four years to be able to write news stories. In court, they asked me if I wrote stories under the command [of someone else]. I’m under house arrest because I’m a journalist who uncover things society wouldn’t otherwise see. I’ve wired 50-150 TL (US$1.30-4.10) to people [in my personal capacity], and authorities call this “financing terrorism.” I talked to a source and asked him to send me a picture from a press conference and authorities described this as “membership in a terrorist organization.”

What are the terms of your arrest? Do you have to wear a tracking device?

I was never strapped with the device because the internet connection was poor. They came to our house in Izmir but they couldn’t connect it. That happened in Diyarbakır, too [to which the journalist relocated while under house arrest]. Police visited the house every day, or every two or three days to get my signature. I was at home every time, of course. I didn’t have experience of being strapped with a device but I did experience the confinement of being stuck indoors.

You are still able to work, though it’s limited. How do you do it?

Out of journalistic habit, I first check the news in the morning when I wake up to see what has happened in the country and the world. Then I write a story if I have one to write or I seek a story out. Ultimately, though, I’m isolated from the society. Visiting the hospital is a problem; I cannot do my own shopping. The place where a journalist can express himself is the streets.

Are you concerned about the possibility that this experience might make you self-censor in the future?

I don’t think that it will. Unfortunately, journalists are frequently detained or arrested in Turkey. It happened to me before, I was detained by the police, two or three times. I don’t believe that I did anything wrong. We are journalists; we may write stories that some may not like.

Melike Aydın, reporter at JİNNEWS

What was the evidence presented by authorities to place you under house arrest?

The evidence against me is not evidence at all. For example, they used a phone call I made – I called my friend saying, “I’m here, where are you?” and she told me where she was – to try to find a terrorist link. Another example: the wife of a local politician called me to tell her husband was taken into police custody. I asked her if they trashed the house and could she send pictures. This is obviously journalistic activity. I’ve wired 500 TL (about $US14) to a friend. They asked if he was a member of a terrorist organization. I believe these house arrests are a result of overpopulation in the prisons. The government wants to bring the atmosphere of fear in the prisons to the neighborhoods.

Have you ever been tried for your journalism before?

A similar case was filed against me in 2018 regarding a social media post that authorities considered “terrorism propaganda.” I received a suspended sentence on the condition of not repeating the offense in the next five years. Prosecutors also reopened old case against me after I became a  journalist; I was taken into police custody while following the Gezi [anti-government] events in Ankara for not obeying an order to disperse. I wasn’t a journalist then but I had a camera and the enthusiasm. I was found guilty in that one. The verdict is in appeal. I was also imprisoned for three months in 2019 for my journalism; the evidence was my reporting and phone calls. The trial lasted about a year and a half before I was acquitted.

How has being under house arrest impacted your wellbeing?

My depression has gotten worse as my house arrest has continued. My performance at work is not the same as it was before. Being confined in one place is hard, even though I’m in the comfort of my own home with the ability to communicate with the outside world. This is a form of psychological torture. At the beginning, you wait month after month hoping they will lift [the house arrest] because the case is ridiculous. Then a year passes.

What kind of journalism have you managed to do under house arrest, and how does this contrast to your working life before?

I do stories that can be done at home. I do interviews on Zoom, I ask people on the phone to send me photographs. [Before my arrest] I wasn’t at home a lot. I was covering trials, social events, traveling outside of the city for stories. Sometimes I was out until 9 p.m. An interview is not the same when you do it on Zoom instead of face to face. There have been a ton of stories that I wanted to cover but I couldn’t. There was a story about local drug deal but I couldn’t do it because I had to go see it in person. I had to capture visuals, convince the people to talk to me, confirm my source’s claims. I couldn’t send somebody else because my source only trusted me. 

Do you find yourself self-censoring, or are you concerned you will in the future?

We are already living with self-censorship. We are reporting the truth of course but either we restrain ourselves or the people we interview do. They say “I’ve said that thing but don’t write that part” or they cancel interviews. This is censorship not by me, but by my sources. Truthfully, I self-censor, too. However, if I have indisputable proof of something and I know that my sources won’t be hurt, then I publish it.

Tolga Güney, reporter with Mezopotamya News Agency

How do you explain your house arrest?

I believe I was targeted because [the government] is interested in my environmental coverage. The questions asked at the police station were all about that. They asked why did I write that report [about a mining company’s activities at the Black Sea shores] and who ordered me to do it? I don’t need to be commanded to write about something that I see with my own eyes. I take commands from my own conscience.

What’s a typical day like under house arrest?

The only thing different is that I don’t go outside. and I wake up at eight, prepare breakfast, take a shower and start working around nine. I live with my colleagues. We have our daily meeting on who handles which story. Then I try to work on my story via the phone or Zoom. One day a week I spend reading books or watching movies.

Can you talk about how house arrest has limited your reporting?

The greatest obstacle turned out to be being unable to use my camera for work. The second obstacle was to not be able to cover many events that were socially or ecologically important. I used to be outside, visiting different neighborhoods after a story.

Are you concerned that you’re resorting to self-censorship under house arrest?

No. I continued to report the same kind of news. I recently wrote a story about how a court order [to stop construction due to environmental damage at Mount Kaz] was ignored. It’s ironic actually, I stay at home, heeding a court order but a company can cut hundreds, thousands of trees, ignoring another. I didn’t self-censor, just the opposite, I got even more ambitious.

What is life like with a tracking device strapped along your ankle?

For the first two months [the strap] was tight. The device has had an effect on me, both physically and psychologically. It’s heavy; I have to turn it when I sit cross-legged because of the pain. I got used to it after some time, it almost became like another body part. But the psychological effect has persisted; I could leave the house with permission if I needed to go to a hospital or something, but I would still have this thing strapped around my ankle. I don’t usually wear pants in the summer, but I had to in order to hide it.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Özgür Öğret.

Lawyers representing the Dink family said they would appeal the February 7 verdict due to an “incomplete investigation and prosecution.”

Dink, founding editor of the bilingual Turkish-Armenian weekly Agos, was shot in Istanbul in 2007 after receiving multiple death threats regarding his work.

“After almost 20 years of trials and retrials of those who allegedly murdered Hrant Dink, the latest verdict has once again failed to satisfy the journalist’s family, who desperately need closure,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “Turkish authorities must stop ignoring the Dink family lawyers’ demands for a deeper investigation if they are to achieve full justice for Dink and expose those behind the conspiracy to murder him.”

The court handed down the following sentences:

• Muharrem Demirkale, life for “premeditated murder”
• Bekir Yokuş, life for “violating the constitution” and 10 years for “assisting in a premeditated murder”
• Yavuz Karakaya, 12 ½ years for “assisting in a premeditated murder”
• Ali Öz, Gazi Günay, and Okan Şimşek, life for “violating the constitution” and 25 years for “premeditated murder”
• Mehmet Ayhan, Hasan Durmuşoğlu, and Onur Karakaya, life for “violating the constitution” and 12 ½  years for “premeditated murder”
• Osman Gülbel, life for “violating the constitution” and 16 years and eight months for “premeditated murder”
• Veysel Şahin, 15 years for “manslaughter due to neglect”

The court also acquitted three defendants — Volkan Şahin, Şükrü Yıldız, and Mehmet Ali Özkılınç — in its retrial of 26 people who were found guilty of criminal conspiracy in 2021. 

The court ordered the arrests of Yokuş, Ayhan, and Onur Karakaya, who were free pending trial.

On January 9, the same court reached a verdict in a parallel trial regarding the murder conspiracy. In that trial, prosecutors had accused defendants with alleged ties to a recently deceased preacher, whom the Turkish government claims had run a terrorist organization, of playing a role in Dink’s murder. Two defendants in that trial received life sentences for “attempting to eliminate the constitutional order,” while lesser charges against some of them were dropped.

CPJ’s email to the chief prosecutor’s office in Istanbul for comment did not receive a reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

“Suat Toktaş’ arrest and the detaining of the other Halk TV personnel is a political move by Turkish authorities to silence critical voices,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “The authorities should immediately release Toktaş, lift the measures of judicial control imposed on other Halk TV staff, and stop using the legal system to harass the media.”

Istanbul prosecutors opened an investigation against Halk TV following a Monday broadcast interview with an expert witness used in municipal investigations, alleging that the interview was secretly recorded without permission and attempted “to manipulate a trial by exposing the name of the court expert in a way that would make [him] a target.”

In a Monday press conference, Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu alleged that the expert witness, who has been involved in multiple investigations against the opposition-controlled municipality, frequently did not offer opinions in their favor. Istanbul prosecutors also opened an investigation against İmamoğlu following the press conference for “making a target” of the expert.

An Istanbul court arrested Toktaş pending trial on Wednesday, and released under judicial control Halk TV hosts Barış Pehlivan and Seda Selek, along with program coordinator Kürşad Oğuz and director Serhan Asker under judicial control, banning them from foreign travel. 

Pehlivan and Selek were detained by the police in Ankara on Tuesday. Halk TV released a statement on Wednesday saying that Oğuz had recorded the conversation and Toktaş authorized it to be aired, which led to their detention in Istanbul.

CPJ’s email to Istanbul’s chief prosecutor did not receive a response.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

The defendants were charged for alleged ties to the recently deceased exiled Islamic cleric Fethullah Gülen, whom Turkey’s government accused of maintaining a terrorist organization called FETÖ. Turkey has claimed that the failed 2016 military coup was organized by Gülen.

“Five Turkish journalists were once again tried because of alleged ties to the failed coup of 2016 without any credible evidence and found guilty again,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “Turkish authorities should not fight the appeals of those five journalists and stop using judicial measures to put pressure on the media, as such prolonged trials on baseless charges hurt Turkey’s press freedom record.”

The court found Yakup Çetin, a former reporter for the shuttered daily Yeni Hayat, guilty of membership in a terrorist organization and sentenced him to six years and three months, in line with the original 2018 sentencing.  

Ahmet Memiş, former editor for news websites Haberdar and Rotahaber; Cemal Azmi Kalyoncu, former reporter for the shuttered news magazine Aksiyon; Ünal Tanık, former Rotahaber editor; and Yetkin Yıldız, former editor for news website Aktif Haber; were found guilty of “knowingly and willingly aiding a [terrorist] organization” and sentenced to 25 months each. The court acquitted Ali Akkuş, former editor for the shuttered daily Zaman.

None of the defendants were rearrested pending appeal.

All six defendants pleaded not guilty and asked for acquittals due to a lack of evidence for terrorist activity. While the journalists were employed by pro-Gülen outlets in 2016, the court documents CPJ inspected showed that their reporting was used as evidence against them.

In 2018, all six journalists were found guilty of membership in a terrorist organization and received sentences of up to seven years and six months.

CPJ’s email to the chief prosecutor’s office in Istanbul for comment on the case did not receive a reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

“Journalists are civilians and must be protected at all times,” said CPJ Advocacy and Communications Director Gypsy Guillén Kaiser in New York. “We call on Turkey’s defense authorities to conduct a thorough investigation into the killings of journalists Jihan Belkin and Nazim Dashdan in Syria. It is imperative to ensure those responsible are held accountable.”

The journalists  were killed in a suspected Turkish drone attack on their vehicle on the road between Tishreen Dam and the town of Sarrin, in northeastern Aleppo, according to multiple news reports and Belkin’s employer, who spoke to CPJ.

Belkin, 28, was a correspondent for the Hawar News Agency (ANHA), while Dashdan, 32, worked as a freelance journalist for multiple outlets including ANHA, Firat News Agency, and Ronahi TV. Both journalists were inside a car while moving between locations as they were covering the recent clashes between Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and the Turkish-backed opposition forces Syrian National Army (SNA), which has been supported by Turkish airstrikes during its offensive. Their driver, Aziz Haj Bozan, was also injured in the attack.

ANHA is a news agency affiliated with the Kurdish administration of northeast Syria and broadcasts in six different languages. ANHA, Firat News Agency, and Ronahi TV are pro-Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which Turkey designates a terrorist organization.

ANHA manager Akram Barakat told CPJ via messaging app that the incident took place around 3:20 pm. “They were returning to Kobani city after covering the fighting near Tishreen when a Turkish drone deliberately targeted their vehicle, killing them instantly,” he said. Barakat said that Belkin had been working as a journalist in northern Syria since 2017, and Dashdan since 2014. “Both had consistently reported on wars and conflicts in the region for various outlets,” he said.

Barakat told CPJ that the journalists’ vehicle was clearly marked as “Press,” but that Turkey “continues to disregard”  international laws.

“Turkish drone strikes have repeatedly targeted journalists in our region while the international community remains silent,” Barakat said. “We urge international organizations, human rights groups, and the global community to take immediate action to stop these attacks on journalists and hold the perpetrators accountable. This silence has only exacerbated the dangers faced by journalists in the region.”

CPJ’s email requesting comment from the Permanent Mission of Turkey to the United Nations did not receive a response. The Turkish Defense Ministry website did not provide access to allow CPJ to request comment.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

“Journalists are civilians and must be protected at all times,” said CPJ Advocacy and Communications Director Gypsy Guillén Kaiser in New York. “We call on Turkey’s defense authorities to conduct a thorough investigation into the killings of journalists Jihan Belkin and Nazim Dashdan in Syria. It is imperative to ensure those responsible are held accountable.”

The journalists  were killed in a suspected Turkish drone attack on their vehicle on the road between Tishreen Dam and the town of Sarrin, in northeastern Aleppo, according to multiple news reports and Belkin’s employer, who spoke to CPJ.

Belkin, 28, was a correspondent for the Hawar News Agency (ANHA), while Dashdan, 32, worked as a freelance journalist for multiple outlets including ANHA, Firat News Agency, and Ronahi TV. Both journalists were inside a car while moving between locations as they were covering the recent clashes between Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and the Turkish-backed opposition forces Syrian National Army (SNA), which has been supported by Turkish airstrikes during its offensive. Their driver, Aziz Haj Bozan, was also injured in the attack.

ANHA is a news agency affiliated with the Kurdish administration of northeast Syria and broadcasts in six different languages. ANHA, Firat News Agency, and Ronahi TV are pro-Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which Turkey designates a terrorist organization.

ANHA manager Akram Barakat told CPJ via messaging app that the incident took place around 3:20 pm. “They were returning to Kobani city after covering the fighting near Tishreen when a Turkish drone deliberately targeted their vehicle, killing them instantly,” he said. Barakat said that Belkin had been working as a journalist in northern Syria since 2017, and Dashdan since 2014. “Both had consistently reported on wars and conflicts in the region for various outlets,” he said.

Barakat told CPJ that the journalists’ vehicle was clearly marked as “Press,” but that Turkey “continues to disregard”  international laws.

“Turkish drone strikes have repeatedly targeted journalists in our region while the international community remains silent,” Barakat said. “We urge international organizations, human rights groups, and the global community to take immediate action to stop these attacks on journalists and hold the perpetrators accountable. This silence has only exacerbated the dangers faced by journalists in the region.”

CPJ’s email requesting comment from the Permanent Mission of Turkey to the United Nations did not receive a response. The Turkish Defense Ministry website did not provide access to allow CPJ to request comment.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

“Journalist Furkan Karabay is the latest in a long line of journalists who have ended up behind bars in Turkey simply for publishing critical reporting and commentary,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “Karabay must not waste months of his life in prison, waiting to be indicted and tried. Turkey’s constant oppression of the free press is an obstacle to citizens’ rights to access information”.

Karabay, a reporter with the independent news site 10Haber, was detained on November 8 during a police raid in Turkey’s largest city, Istanbul.

The following evening, an Istanbul court transferred Karabay to prison pending trial on suspicion of “insulting a public servant,” “making targets of those who were tasked to combat terrorism,” and “knowingly distributing misleading information to the public,” according to news reports. 

A court document seen by Reuters said that the allegations against Karabay related to his social media posts on X, where he named the prosecutors investigating an opposition mayor — facts that Karabay told the court had been reported by a number of media outlets.

On October 31, Karabay reported on the arrest of mayor Ahmet Özer, of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), who prosecutors accused of having links to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which is banned as a terrorist organization in Turkey.

Journalists in Turkey who report on the judiciary are frequently charged with “making targets of those who were tasked to combat terrorism.”

On December 28, 2023, Karabay was arrested on the suspicion of “making targets of those who were tasked to combat terrorism” after reporting on a bribery trial. He was released pending trial on January 8, 2024.

CPJ’s emails requesting comment from the ministry of justice and the chief prosecutor’s office in Istanbul did not receive any replies.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

An ethnic Uyghur Turkish musician has won this year’s award in the TV drama music category from a Turkish arts foundation.

Güldiyar Tanridagli, 38, widely recognized in Turkey, won the “Best TV Series Music” award from the Film Industry and Artists Strengthening Foundation, or Film-San Foundation, for composing the song "Hopeless Love" for the TV series “Yali Capkini,” or “Golden Boy.”

The series has captivated viewers with its engaging storyline, talented actors and music perfectly adapted to the show.

Tanridagli, who received a master’s degree in orchestral piano from Mozarteum University Salzburg in Austria in 2014, is known for her classical and classical-crossover music.

Kıvanc Terzioglu, general manager of the Film-San Foundation, said the organization chose Güldiyar for the honor because of her music.

As a “very accomplished musician” and “incredible artist,” she deserved the award, he said.

Tanridagli said it was “especially meaningful to hear from people who speak different languages, expressing their appreciation” at the award ceremony at Cemal Resit Rey Concert Hall in Istanbul on Sept. 9.

“They said that even though they don’t understand the language, they could grasp the meaning through the music,” she said.

In talking about the reasons for the popularity of her music in TV dramas, Tanridagli said, “For TV music, it’s crucial that the music aligns with the scenario and the scene.” 

“To emphasize the emotions in a particular moment, it’s not enough to have beautiful music alone; it also needs to be fitting and appropriate for that context,” she said.

Artistic background

Tanridagli worked for Kalan Müzik, a Turkish independent record label company based in Istanbul, from 2015 to 2020 — the year she set up her own music company Tanridagli Müzik Yapim and began producing music for Turkish television films.

She also composed music for films and other TV dramas, including “Seni Cok Bekledim” (“Waiting for you”), “Baba” (“Father”), “Sahane Hayatım” (“My Wonderful Life”), “Ya Cok Seversen” (“If You Love”), “Gülcemal,” and “Veda Mektubu” (“Farewell Letter”).  

“Among these, “Yali Capkini” received the most positive reviews globally, with its music gaining millions of plays on YouTube, Spotify and iTunes,” she said.

Tanridagli’s mother, Gülzade Tanridagli, expressed immense pride in her daughter’s achievements, attributing them to years of rigorous music education and dedication. 

Tanridagli’s musical talent was evident at an early age and nurtured by a family with a rich artistic background, she said.

When her parents went to Turkey to study in 1986, Tanridagli stayed with her grandparents in Kumul in Xinjiang. 

There, she received her first music education from her musician grandparents, who introduced her to Uyghur classical music, her mother said.

“Tanridagli’s musical foundation up to the age of five and a half was built on the Uyghur music at our home,” Gülzade Tanridagli said. “My family has always had a deep love for music and art. We had various musical instruments, such as the dutar, tembur and ghijak, all of which my father played. He knew many traditional songs.”

Tanridagli’s father Parhat Kurban Tanridagli, now deceased, also played several musical instruments and performed along with his wife in concerts with Abdurehim Heyt, an influential Uyghur musician and dutar player.

Heyt was detained by Chinese authorities in Xinjiang in 2017, the year that internments of Uyghurs in “re-education” camps began en masse. He previously traveled to Turkey and played Uyghur music at several concerts there. 

When Tanridagli was five and a half years old, she moved to Turkey with her family. She took piano lessons and later pursued music studies at Mimar Sinan Fine Art University in Istanbul and in Austria.

Tanridagli frequently traveled in Europe to play the piano at concerts. After she graduated, she returned to Istanbul and continued performing. 

Kıvanc Terzioglu of the Film-San Foundation predicted that Tanridagli’s career would continue to prosper in the years to come.

“Güldiyar’s music has reached everyone in Turkey and will reach even more,” he said. “She will be more successful.”

Translated by RFA Uyghur. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Joshua Lipes.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Mihray Abral and Nuriman Abdureshid for RFA Uyghur.

“Turkish authorities continue to practice the ‘virtual patrolling’ and censorship of social media users under the false guise of national security,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “The request to block access to multiple X accounts, including those of journalists and media, will have a negative effect on press freedom in Turkey, where media have already worked under constant government restraints.” 

On August 20, a criminal court in the northeast city of Gümüşhane ordered 69 X accounts, including those of at least three journalists and a media outlet, to be blocked from access inside Turkey. The court ruling was issued in response to request by the local military police to stop “terrorist organization propaganda,” according to reports. The court document, reviewed by CPJ, did not specify the nature of the alleged terrorist propaganda. 

The list of accounts CPJ reviewed included those of politicians, activists and individuals from various countries. As of August 27, some of those accounts were not accessible from inside Turkey, while others were suspended or deleted. The accounts of Amberin Zaman, chief correspondent for the independent news website Al Monitor; Deniz Tekin, a correspondent for the local media freedom group MLSA in the southeastern city of Diyarbakır; and the pro-Kurdish daily Yeni Yaşam were accessible despite being included on the court list. The account of Öznur Değer, a reporter for the pro-Kurdish news site JİNNEWS, was inaccessible. 

The Constitutional Court of Turkey canceled the Turkish police force’s authority for “virtual patrolling” in 2020 due to the right to privacy and the protection of personal data. However, the Turkish security forces continue the practice.

CPJ emailed Turkey’s interior ministry, which oversees the military police, for comment but didn’t receive a reply. 

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

“We are deeply concerned that Syrian opposition factions detained journalist Bakr al-Kassem without explanation and transferred him to Turkish intelligence custody,” said Yeganeh Rezaian, CPJ’s interim MENA program coordinator, in Washington, D.C. “Syrian groups should stop copying President Bashar al-Assad’s aggressive approach towards the media. Local authorities should immediately release al-Kassem and stop detaining journalists.”

Al-Kassem’s wife Nabiha Taha, who is also a journalist, told CPJ that the couple were detained by local military police at a checkpoint in Syria’s Al Bab city in Aleppo Governorate, which borders Turkey, as they returned by car from covering an exhibition.

Turkish troops and Ankara-backed armed opposition groups fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad control a large chunk of territory along the border, which Turkey regards as a “safe zone” to protect itself against Kurdish rebels.

Taha, a reporter for the local news channel Aleppo Today, said that she was released after about two hours, but her husband, who freelances for AFP news agency and Turkish state-owned Anadolu Agency, was not.

CPJ was unable to determine why al-Kassem was detained.

Military officials seized the couple’s phones at the checkpoint and later searched their house, confiscating Kassem’s computer and cameras.

CPJ’s text messages requesting comment from Abdurrahman Mustafa, head of the Syrian interim government which administers the area, did not receive a response. Mustafa told AFP that he was unaware of Kassem’s detention.

CPJ did not receive any replies to its requests for comment sent via email to Turkey’s mission to the United Nations and via text messages to Hadi Al Bahra, President of the opposition Syrian National Coalition, which includes the Syrian interim government.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

“Iraqi Kurdish authorities have made a habit out of detaining and harassing journalists,” said Yeganeh Rezaian, CPJ’s Interim MENA Program Coordinator, in Washington D.C. “We are deeply concerned over the detention of prominent photojournalist Murat Yazar in the region for eight days and call on the authorities to immediately stop harassing members of the press and let them do their jobs freely.”

Iraqi Kurdish security forces, known as Asayish, have detained, raided, and harassed dozens of journalists in the last three years.

Yazar, a Pulitzer Center grantee, had gone missing in the city of Zakho, in the Duhok province of Iraqi Kurdistan, on July 13. Iraqi Kurdish Asayish forces detained and interrogated him for what his family said was his unintentional entry into an area under restrictiondue to Turkish military operations against the outlawed Kurdish Workers’ Party, which Turkey considers a terrorist organization. Yazar entered the area while working on a visual storytelling project about the Tigris River, according to a statement by the family, which CPJ reviewed. He was released without any charges, the statement said.

The officers confiscated Yazar’s passport, phone, and camera bag, according to the statement, and did not allow him to call his family or the Turkish consulate in Erbil.

After his release from Duhok Asayish prison, he crossed the border into Turkey around 1 a.m. on Monday, according to his brother, Baran, and two of his friends, Nil Delahaye, a human rights activist, and Paul Salopek, the founding executive director of the nonprofit Out of Eden Walk.

On Sunday, CPJ called Ahmed Ramazan, head of the Zakho police, and Ali Osman, an investigator at the Zakho Asayish office, who both stated that they had no information about the journalist.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

In May, RTÜK fined and issued a gag order after the outlet mentioned the mass killings of Armenians under Ottoman rule in 1915, which Turkey refuses to recognize as genocide as the successor of the Ottoman Empire. RTÜK canceled the outlet’s license earlier this month when the outlet continued to broadcast its programs. 

“In the case of Açık Radyo, the remarks in question are clearly covered by the right to freedom of expression as guaranteed by international human rights law, including the European Convention on Human Rights. We urgently call on RTÜK to swiftly reinstate Açık Radyo’s license,” the statement said.

Read the full statement here.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

The 4th Ankara Court of Serious Crimes convicted eight journalists on charges of membership in a terrorist organization as part of a mass trial of 11 journalists employed by the pro-Kurdish outlets Mezopotamya News Agency and JİNNEWS. They remain free pending appeal. The other three journalists were acquitted.

“Turkish authorities charged a group of Kurdish journalists with membership in a terrorist organization while presenting no solid evidence to back their accusations and yet somehow found eight of them guilty,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “Authorities should not fight the journalists’ appeals and must stop filing baseless charges of terrorism against members of the media.”

The court found Mezopotamya editor Diren Yurtsever; Mezopotamya reporters Berivan Altan, Deniz Nazlım, Emrullah Acar, Hakan Yalçın, Salman Güzelyüz, and Zemo Ağgöz Yiğitsoy, and freelance journalist Öznur Değer guilty of being members of the outlawed Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK), which Turkey has designated a terrorist organization. None of the journalists attended the hearing and were represented instead by their lawyers.

The court acquitted Mezopotamya reporter Ceylan Şahinli, JİNNEWS reporter Ümmü Habibe Eren, and former Mezopotamya reporting intern Mehmet Günhan.

The authorities detained the 11 journalists in October 2022 and indicted them in February 2023. CPJ emailed the Ankara chief prosecutor’s office for comment but received no immediate reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

A journalist for CNN Turk was repeatedly slapped and nearly struck by an SUV on June 1, 2024, during a live broadcast in rural Pennsylvania.

Yunus Paksoy, the Washington D.C. bureau chief for CNN Turk, an Istanbul-based news channel affiliated with CNN, was broadcasting live with his iPhone outside the Chestnut Retreat Center in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania, which is believed to be the residence of the U.S.-based Turkish cleric Fethullah Gülen.

A GMC SUV drove directly toward Paksoy so that he had to jump from the curb into the roadway to avoid being hit, according to a criminal complaint.

On air, Paksoy is heard saying in English: “Pull away. Pull away. Just pull away. What the hell do you think you’re doing here? Are you mad? Are you mad? What are you doing?”

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

“We are pleased with the acquittal of journalist Sezgin Kartal, but let us not forget that the case against him was built on next to no evidence and should not have existed in the first place, let alone cost the journalist five months of his life in jail,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “Authorities should not appeal the acquittal and ensure that members of the media are not prosecuted or so easily imprisoned without concrete evidence of wrongdoing.”

Authorities arrested Kartal in January 2023, and raided his home on the basis of his alleged resemblance to a man in a 2014 photograph of members of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which Turkey recognizes as a terrorist organization. He spent more than five months behind bars before being released pending trial.

Kartal is a freelance journalist who covers Alevi issues, human rights, corruption, and labor issues and hosts a news show for the independent outlet Özgün TV.

CPJ attended Tuesday’s trial at the 22nd Istanbul Court of Serious Crimes. Kartal, who wasn’t present, was represented by his lawyers, who emphasized the lack of evidence against their client in closing arguments.

The indictment said the journalist met with alleged terrorists in Syria on September 24, 2014, pointing to a three-hour window in Kartal’s phone records, during which his cellphone did not receive any signal from Turkish towers, according to CPJ’s review of the document.

Kartal’s lawyer, Oya Meriç Eyüpoğlu, said the journalist was in the Suruç district in Şanlıurfa Province at Turkey’s southeastern border with Syria on that date, covering the ongoing refugee crisis. However, Eyüpoğlu said there is no evidence or chance that Kartal could have illegally crossed to Syria, had his photograph taken with a group of armed men, and returned to Turkey within three hours without being noticed by Turkish border guards.

Eyüpoğlu cited a forensic report that determined the photograph was taken during the daytime at 1:13 p.m., while the three-hour window that Kartal’s phone was off was from 8-11 p.m. that night.

Berfin Karaşah, Kartal’s other lawyer, argued that even if her client was the man in the picture, that would provide grounds for charges regarding illegal arms and violating border security, not terrorist organization membership.

CPJ emailed the Istanbul chief prosecutor’s office for comment but did not immediately receive any reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Ağırel, a columnist for Cumhuriyet, a daily known for its critical coverage of the government, said he observed people wandering around and filming his house in Istanbul, picking through his trash, damaging his car, and following his family members, according to four videos the journalist posted Wednesday on X, formerly known as Twitter, and a report by his outlet. Ağırel told CPJ he suspected these incidents were connected to his reporting and commentary on narcotics trafficking.

“Turkish authorities must do everything that they can to ensure the security of journalist Murat Ağırel and his family,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “The authorities should take swift action before something irrevocable happens and prove that members of the media in Turkey are not defenseless against those who harass them and mean them harm.”

Ağırel told CPJ that some of the people were identified by the police and questioned, but authorities took no further action after the suspects denied spying on the journalist.

Ağırel told CPJ he filed a criminal complaint with police and applied for a gun license, which was denied because of his 2020 conviction for violating the country’s national intelligence laws in his reporting on the death of a National Intelligence Agency officer.

Ağırel said authorities told him that he could apply to the police and ask for close protection, but he did not because he had already asked for that in the criminal complaint.

“It feels ridiculous to me to apply again [and] again,” Ağırel told CPJ.

On Thursday, CPJ emailed the Interior Ministry of Turkey, which oversees the police, asking about what security measures are being taken to protect Ağırel. The email did not receive a reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

The 36^th Ankara Court of Serious Crimes on Tuesday, June 11, sentenced seven men to nine years in prison each on charges of causing “intentional injury” and making threats, according to a report by 12 Punto, a news website known for its critical coverage of the government, and court documents reviewed by CPJ. Demirağ will appeal the verdict in an effort to have the victims tried on attempted murder charges.

“The sentencing of seven men who brutally beat Turkish journalist Yavuz Selim Demirağ in 2019 is a positive step on the path to end Turkey’s culture of impunity for violence against journalists,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “However, Turkish authorities should heed Demirağ’s appeal of the verdict and take concrete, swift action to ensure journalists in Turkey feel safe from similar assaults and threats.”

Demirağ was beaten by at least six men with baseball bats outside his home in an attack that left him hospitalized exactly five years, one month, and one day before the sentencing, Demirağ told CPJ by phone, adding that the trial began 3.5 years after the incident. The journalist told CPJ he believes his attackers were instigated to assault him due to his political commentary.

The sentences had increased time because the defendants acted as a group and told the court they regretted their actions, according to the 12 Punto report and court documents. The defendants have maintained that the attack was not in connection to Demirağ’s journalism but was instead caused by a traffic disagreement.

None of the defendants were immediately arrested after the verdict pending an appeal, Demirağ told CPJ, adding that one is already in prison and a second is expected to be arrested for a delayed sentence, both from unrelated trials.

Demirağ told CPJ that he hoped the verdict in his trial and the May 2024 sentencing of seven people involved in a raid on a broadcast studio would be a “deterrent” for future attacks against the media in Turkey. “Despite everything, this is a positive development against impunity,” Demirağ said.

In April 2022, at least 50 people raided the Deniz Postası’s broadcast studio, during which attackers beat journalist Azim Deniz and his guest.

CPJ emailed the law firm representing the defendants and the chief prosecutor’s office in Ankara for comment but did not receive any reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Fatih Aktaş, a photojournalist for the Turkish state-run outlet Anadolu Agency, was shoved to the ground by multiple New York City police officers while covering a pro-Palestinian protest in Brooklyn on May 31, 2024.

Protesters gathered outside Barclays Center arena at 3 p.m., NBC News reported, before walking the mile to the Brooklyn Museum, where they occupied the plaza and entered the building, hanging banners both inside and on the facade and calling for a cease-fire in the ongoing Israel-Hamas war.

Aktaş told Anadolu he was photographing the violent police response to the protests when he became a target of it. “While I was trying to capture the police intervention in the protests, a police officer strongly pushed me backward,” Aktaş said. “To avoid damaging my camera, I had to fall on my back, hitting my elbow hard on the ground.”

In footage of the incident, Aktaş appears to be standing and photographing police while demonstrators march in front of the museum. At least three officers can then be seen shoving Aktaş, with the photojournalist landing on the ground approximately 10 feet back from the officers. Moments later, another officer can be seen helping him to his feet as two supervisory officers walk past, with one of the higher-ranking officers then pushing him again and ordering him to back up.

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

The comments came on Monday after Fidan met with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Beijing to discuss regional and international issues, and ahead of his planned visits to the two cities midweek.

“These two cities are ancient Turkic and Islamic cities that have contributed significantly to China's cultural heritage,” Fidan said. “They serve as a bridge between China and the Turkic and Islamic worlds, symbolizing our historical friendship and neighborliness."

On Wednesday, Fidan visited the Yanghang Mosque and the International Grand Bazaar in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, and later went to Kashgar.

There was no reaction in the Chinese media to his comments, but Hamutkhan Kokturk, the former president of the East Turkistan Foundation, a Turkey-based advocacy group, said that Fidan’s statement appeared to be a rejection of China’s claims about Xinjiang, which Beijing took control of in 1949.

"Throughout history,... the Chinese oppressors have always claimed that East Turkestan has been an inseparable part of China,” Kokturk said, using the term Uyghurs prefer for their homeland. 

“This time, Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan’s statement that Kashgar and Urumqi are inseparable parts of the Turkic world is a historic declaration,” he said. “I understand that this was a response to China’s lies.”

The Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities in Xinjiang, who have cultural and linguistic ties to Turkey, have been oppressed by the Chinese government, with an estimated 1.8 million herded into “re-education” camps where they are subjected to forced labor and human rights violations.

Beijing says the camps are vocational training centers and have since been closed. 

The United States has labeled Beijing’s treatment of the Uyghurs a “genocide.

The World Uyghur Congress said Fidan’s comments “emphasizing the historical truth emphasizing the historical truth that Urumqi and Kashgar are Turkic and Islamic cities is of great historical importance.”

The advocacy group said it hoped that Fidan would “raise the issues of crimes against humanity and human rights violations that the Uyghurs are suffering during his trip to China,” and not become “a tool for China's false propaganda."

Istanbul protest

On Sunday, before Fidan’s trip, scores of Uyghurs living in Istanbul, Turkey, staged a protest against China for bringing Uyghur artists from Urumqi to perform traditional songs and dances at a concert hall as part of a “Xinjiang is a Wonderful Place” program they claim whitewashes Beijing’s treatment of the Uyghur people.

Protesters gathered in front of the Cemal Reşit Rey Concert Hall to chant slogans including: “Terrorist China, stop the genocide!” “Terrorist China, stop the lies!” “Murderous China, get out of East Turkestan!” The phrase refers to what the Uyghurs prefer to call their homeland. 

When the bus carrying the Uyghur performers and the Chinese government officials approached the concert hall, protesters tried to block its way but they were stopped by the Turkish police.

Some Chinese standing on the balcony of the concert hall took photos of the Uyghur protesters below, and the protesters took photos of the Chinese as well.

At an outdoor press conference during the street protest, Kubilay Kerem Buraq, chairman of the Anadolu Members Association, blasted China for falsely portraying Uyghur culture as Chinese culture.

“To cover its assimilation and genocidal policies, the Chinese government has been calling Uyghur dance as Chinese folk dance, Uyghur songs as Chinese folk songs,” Buraq said. 

“They are trying to show Uyghur culture as Chinese culture and implant their false claim, namely, East Turkestan is a part of China, into people’s minds around the world,” he said.

Buraq also criticized the Turkish government for allowing the performance and accepted invitations to it. “We condemn them for what they did,” he said.

During the protest, representatives from other Uyghur associations in Istanbul also took turns condemning China.

“Oppression and massacres are taking place in East Turkestan, Uyghur men are being sent to the concentration camps, and their wives are being forced to live with Han Chinese,” said Kok Bore, head of the Blue Turk Bodun Association, an advocacy group promoting the rights of Turkic peoples around the world. “How long shall we be silent?” 

RFA reporters tried to enter the concert hall but were not allowed to do so, being told that only those invited by the Chinese Ambassador Wei Xiaodong were permitted to enter.

Translated by Martin Shawn. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Arslan and Erkin Tarim for RFA Uyghur.

In June 2023, Aygül, chief editor of the privately owned local news website Bitlis News and chair of the local trade group Bitlis Journalists Society, was hospitalized after he was attacked by Yücel Baysalı and Engin Kaplan, bodyguards of the then-mayor in the eastern city of Tatvan. The two were released from jail while the trial was ongoing and received suspended sentences, ultimately spending less than three months behind bars. Aygül, meanwhile, was sentenced to two months and five days in prison in January 2024 on charges of insulting Baysalı and Kaplan; he is appealing the sentence and has not been taken into custody.  

Now, the journalist faces additional charges related to the incident. On May 15, prosecutors filed suit against Aygül and his brother Ahmet Aygül in the 1^st Tatvan Court of Penal Instance alleging that they threatened Baysalı and Kaplan twice on September 30, according to reports and court documents, which CPJ reviewed. The trial is set to begin September 18, 2024, Aygül told CPJ. If convicted of threatening the complainants, the pair could face two to five years in prison.  

“Turkish journalist Sinan Aygül was brutally assaulted by two men who spent little time behind bars before being released with delayed sentences, and now the journalist faces charges for insulting and threatening these same two men,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “Turkish authorities should prioritize ending violence against journalists instead of heaping charges on the victim. It’s not too late to do the right thing.”

The indictment, prepared by the Tatvan Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office, said that Aygül and his brother Ahmet Aygül allegedly threatened Baysalı and Kaplan in the presence of a security guard at a municipal building in Tatvan on September 30, 2023. Aygül told CPJ that he and his brother were at the building that day to obtain security camera footage that he believed would prove that the attackers did not act alone; he said when they were refused access to the footage they left without threatening anyone. 

The indictment also said that the same day, Ahmet Aygül allegedly sent threatening messages to Baysalı using the Instagram account “ahmt.aygl.” The indictment cited testimony of an unnamed person who allegedly saw the threatening messages. Aygül said that the charges did not provide proof of his brother’s connection with the account. 

CPJ reviewed a report from the Turkish police’s cybercrimes unit which could not determine the owner of the Instagram account, which had no posts and four followers. 

Aygül told CPJ that he believed that former mayor Mehmet Emin Geylani ordered the June 2023 attack in response to his coverage of alleged corruption in the municipality. Geylani, of the ruling Justice and Development Party, has denied any involvement with the attack.

CPJ was unable to locate contact information for the lawyers for Baysalı and Kaplan. 

CPJ emailed the Tatvan Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office for comment but didn’t receive any reply.

On February 28, 2023, a court found Aygül guilty of violating Turkey’s disinformation law and sentenced him to 10 months in prison. He was the first journalist to be arrested and prosecuted under this law, and Turkey’s Supreme Court of Appeals overturned the verdict on May 10, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

At least 50 people raided the studio, led by suspected members of a local branch of the Turkish nationalist group Ülkü Ocakları (Gray Wolves), according to reports.

On May 10, the 1^st Kayseri High Criminal Court. sentenced seven defendants involved in the incident to 11 years and 4 months in prison each on numerous charges, including “causing simple bodily harm” and “depriving someone from his freedom by force”, according to news reports. All defendants remained free pending appeal, Deniz told CPJ via phone.  

“The sentencing of some of the perpetrators of the raid on Deniz Postası’s broadcast studio is a welcome step in the right direction to fight violence impunity against Turkey’s media,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “Turkish authorities should continue investigating the attack to identify and hold all those involved to account and ensure that members of the media are safe from such attacks.”

Deniz told CPJ that several other people allegedly involved in the attack were not charged by authorities, and he is considering appealing the verdict.

Deniz and his lawyers also said they believe that the sentences could have been higher. The court acquitted the defendants of the charge of “violating the right to the freedom of communication,” which carries up to 3 years in prison, because the attack happened minutes before the beginning of the broadcast instead of during it, Deniz said. He also noted that the defendants also received reduced sentences for good behavior in court. 

But he also welcomed the ruling as a warning to others who would attack media offices. “The perception of impunity was broken, at the very least,” he said. 

CPJ sent questions about the case to a lawyer for the defendants over messaging app but did not receive any reply by publication. CPJ also emailed the Chief Prosecutor’s Office in Kayseri for comment but didn’t receive a reply.

In a separate incident on February 5, 2024, Deniz was shot near his home in the central city of Kayseri. The shooter, who was quickly apprehended by the police, claimed that he acted on his own accord, but Deniz said that he believes there was an instigator in the attack.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

On April 26 in the southeastern city of Batman, an appeals court upheld a 25-month sentence for Mavioğlu and Demirel for “making propaganda” for the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) with their 2015 documentary “Bakur (North).” The film is about the lives of the militia in camps of the PKK, which has been fighting the Turkish forces since the 1980s and has been recognized as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the European Union, and the United States.

The filmmakers’ case is currently waiting for review by the Supreme Court of Appeals; the trial date has yet to be set.

Erkan Şenses, Mavioğlu’s lawyer, told CPJ that the journalists may be imprisoned for approximately 18.5 months if they lose the next appeal; at least the first six and a half months of which would be in a closed prison with the possibility of being transferred to an open prison with lower security, which could include temporary leave under certain conditions.

“The terrorism charges levied against Turkish documentarians Ertuğrul Mavioğlu and Çayan Demirel are an attempt to silence the voices that offer a nongovernmental view on the Kurdish people and their history,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “Turkish authorities should not contest their upcoming appeal as their acquittals would help create an atmosphere in Turkey in which the media can operate without oppression and fear of retaliation.”

The pair were originally found guilty of the charge in 2019 and sentenced to 4.5 years in prison. The filmmakers remained free pending appeal. In 2022, a local appeals court ordered a retrial.

The court found the defendants guilty once more in December 2023, and reduced the sentences to 25 months for each, according to court documents inspected by CPJ.

Demirel is considered “99% permanently disabled,” according to an official medical report, after his heart stopped for 15 minutes on March 18, 2015, one day after the completion of the documentary Bakur. Demirel’s ability to see, speak, and move has deteriorated, and he has been unable to care for himself.

CPJ emailed the chief prosecutor’s office in Batman for comment but did not receive a reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

The three journalists were jailed by an Istanbul court on April 27, the latest link in a chain of incarcerations, which has seen the work of Kurdish journalists used as evidence of terrorist activity.

“On the occasion of World Press Freedom Day, May 3, we renew our urgent call to the authorities of Turkey to cease the harassment and intimidation of Kurdish journalists,” the statement said. “We urge them to ensure the safety and protection of all journalists in line with Turkey’s obligations under its own Press Law and Constitution. We also call for a halt to the constant violation of the rights of freedom of expression and media freedom as protected under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights.”

Read the full statement here.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

The 13^th Istanbul Court of Serious Crimes on Thursday found Terkoğlu, a columnist for the pro-opposition daily Cumhuriyet, guilty of “making targets of those assigned to combat terrorism” and sentenced him to two years in prison, his outlet reported. Terkoğlu, who was not immediately arrested, told CPJ after the verdict that his lawyers would appeal.

“Barış Terkoğlu did not target anyone. He has been found guilty for reporting the facts and analyzing them as a journalist, nothing more,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “Turkish authorities should not fight Terkoğlu’s appeal and review the vindictive use of the law article for ‘making targets of those assigned to combat terrorism’ due to continued prosecutions of journalists who report on security forces and judiciary.”

Terkoğlu’s trial began in 2021 after a complaint filed by Akın Gürlek, former head judge of the 14^th Istanbul Court of Serious Crimes and current deputy justice minister, citing a 2020 column published in Cumhuriyet and a news story published on the independent news website Odatv, where Terkoğlu previously worked as the news editor.

Terkoğlu pled not guilty at the final hearing on Thursday and said: “Judges, prosecutors, and police are citizens. Therefore, they can be criticized for the actions they take and the decisions they make. Giving them exclusive protection is unconstitutional. I criticize the judiciary in 90% of my articles. That’s one thing, targeting [people] is another.”

Terkoğlu told CPJ that his lawyers assumed he would spend approximately six months in prison if they lost the appeal. “There wouldn’t be any prison time to consider if they would have filed a simple ‘insult’ trial,” he said.

Turkish authorities previously used the article to prosecute a Cumhuriyet journalist for her reporting in 2018.

CPJ emailed the chief prosecutor’s office in Istanbul and the Justice Ministry of Turkey for comment but did not receive a reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

When New Zealanders commemorate Anzac Day today on April 25, it’s not only to honour the soldiers who lost their lives in World War I and subsequent conflicts, but also to mark a defining event for national identity.

The battle of Gallipoli against the Ottoman Empire, the story goes, was where the young nation passed its first test of courage and determination.

The question of why New Zealand soldiers ended up on Turkish beaches in April 1915 is typically not part of these commemorations. Rather, our collective memories begin with the moment of the early morning landing.

• READ MORE: New lessons about old wars: keeping the complex story of Anzac Day relevant in the 21st century
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• Less than illustrious: remembering the Anzacs means also not forgetting some committed war crimes
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Consider, for example, the timing of the Anzac Day dawn service, or the Museum of New Zealand-Te Papa Tongarewa’s exhibition, Gallipoli: The Scale of Our War, which plunges visitors straight into the action.

This selective retelling of history is necessary for the “coming of age” narrative to work. It helps conceal that Britain was pursuing its own colonial ambitions against the Ottomans, and that New Zealand took part in World War I as “a member of the British club”, as historian Ian McGibbon puts it, loyally devoted to the imperial cause.

Against the background of the recent horrors and escalating tensions in the Middle East, however, it seems more important than ever to make these silences speak in our commemorations of Gallipoli.

Britain’s colonial interests
While the causes of World War I are complex and multifaceted, historians have extensively documented that Britain had long seen parts of the decaying Ottoman Empire as prey for colonial expansion.

Already, in the late 1800s, Britain had taken control of Cyprus and Egypt.

Turkey’s Middle Eastern possessions were of interest to the government in London because they provided not only a land route to the colony in India, but also rich oil reserves.

Hence, when the Ottoman Empire signed an alliance with Germany — mainly to guard against Russian territorial aspirations – and somewhat reluctantly entered World War I, the British did not lament this as a diplomatic defeat.

“The decrepit Ottoman Empire was more useful to them as a victim than as a dependent ally,” as the late historian Michael Howard explained.

The day after Britain declared war on the Ottomans on November 5, 1914, British troops attacked Basra (in today’s southern Iraq) to secure nearby oil facilities.

In the following months, the Triple Entente of Britain, France and Russia won a number of easy victories, which fuelled the belief the Turkish military was weak. This in turn led Britain to devise a plan to launch a direct strike on Constantinople, the Ottoman capital.

First, however, they had to clear the Gallipoli peninsula of enemy defences. And who better suited to this task than the first convoy of Anzac troops, just a short distance away in Egypt after passing through the Suez Canal?

Palestine: a complex tangle of pledges
As is well known, war planners in London had underestimated the enemy’s military strength. The battle of Gallipoli ended in a Turkish victory over Britain and its allies.

Nevertheless, fortunes eventually turned against the Ottoman Empire.

Although a whole century has gone by, British diplomatic efforts and secret agreements that were meant to accelerate the collapse of the Ottoman Empire still shape the Middle East today.

Most significantly, it is the violent conflict over Palestine that can be traced back to colonial power dealings during World War I. The crux of the problem is that Britain affirmed three irreconcilable wartime commitments in relation to Palestine.

First, in the hope of initiating an Arab revolt against Ottoman rule, the British made promises to Sharif Husayn, the emir of Mecca, about the creation of an independent Arab kingdom.

Second, in the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which divided the Ottomans’ Arab lands into British and French spheres of interest, Palestine was designated for international administration.

Third, in the Balfour Declaration of November 1917, the British government pledged support for a “Jewish national home” in Palestine — a move motivated by a mixture of realpolitik and Biblical romanticism.

In the end, it was the third commitment that turned out to be the most enduring.

How should we remember Gallipoli?
Amid this complex history, we must not forget the thousands of New Zealand soldiers who died in World War I — men who had either volunteered, expecting a quick and heroic war, or served as draftees.

However, we need to have a public discussion about whether it is still appropriate for our commemorations to skip over the question of why these men fought in Europe and the Mediterranean.

Facing up to this question not only makes us aware of our responsibilities towards the Middle East problem, but it can also serve as a lesson for the future — not to blindly follow great powers into their military adventures.

Olli Hellmann, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Waikato. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

After Sunday’s local elections, Turkey’s highest election authority, the Supreme Election Council (YSK), rescinded the victory of a pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM) mayoral candidate on Tuesday, in the eastern metropolitan city of Van, on grounds that he was not eligible to run. YSK then certified election results in favor of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), which received the second-most votes.

The decision, as well as claims of voter fraud at polling stations in the mostly Kurdish-populated regions of eastern and southeastern Turkey, led to days of social unrest in multiple cities with Van being the foremost epicenter. Another major site of protests and clashes occurred in the southeastern city of Hakkari, where the results of 60 ballots were contested by AKP and six contested by DEM.

Police intervened in the protests with arrests, tear gas,  rubber bullets and water cannons, targeting several field reporters, some of whom were taken into custody. Multiple journalists also reported receiving threats and insults online and offline. 

“Field reporters are among the most vulnerable journalists in Turkey. Security forces, and even civilians, exploit the country’s institutionalized impunity to pressure journalists into not doing their jobs. Their hostility extends to not taking threats against journalists – whether online or face to face — seriously,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “Turkish authorities should, protect all journalists who believe their security is compromised, remove the issued foreign travel bans, investigate the claims of excessive force, and end the constant violent actions against field reporters.”

All of the field reporters in Van who spoke to CPJ said they were tear-gassed on both Tuesday and Wednesday. Protests ended and turned into celebrations by Wednesday evening in Van after the DEM candidate’s win was recognized by authorities. 

CPJ documented these actions against journalists in post-election unrest:

• Police in the Esenyurt District of Istanbul took four journalists into custody Wednesday while they were following a protest march in solidarity with the DEM Party’s troubles in Van: Ferhat Sezgin with the pro-Kurdish news outlet Mezopotamya Agency, Sema Korkmaz with the pro-Kurdish daily newspaper Yeni Yaşam, Müzeyyen Yüce with the critical news website Artı Gerçek, and Dilan Şimşek from the pro-Alevi PİRHA news agency. Police beat the journalists and broke Sezgin’s nose, and smashed his camera, according to reports. The journalists were brought to an Istanbul courthouse for processing on Friday, according to reports. Prosecutors transferred Sezgin and Korkmaz to a court on duty, asking for their arrests pending investigation while Yüce and Şimşek were released. All four were later released, Sezgin and Korkmaz, under a foreign travel ban.
• Freelance journalist Medine Mamedoğlu, from the southeastern Province of Hakkari, posted on X that she received death threats in connection with her reporting on the protests in Van. Separately, Mamedoğlu was briefly taken into police custody in Hakkari on Wednesday while she was following a protest march. CPJ spoke to the journalist by phone Thursday, and she said her lawyer will file criminal complaints regarding the death threats alongside complaints against the police officers who took her into custody in Hakkari. Mamedoğlu told CPJ that the officers tried to take her two cameras and beat her when she resisted. “They punched me in the mouth, hit me in the back, pulled my hair and throttled me,” she said. One of her two cameras was broken and another suffered a damaged lens, according to the journalist. 
• Freelance journalist Oktay Candemir said in a post on Wednesday that police officers in Van forcibly deleted images on his phone, threatened to get him off the street and insulted him. Candemir told CPJ via messaging app on Wednesday that the officers also punched him in the face. The journalist said he will file a criminal complaint about the incident. 
• Freelance journalist Ruşen Takva was subjected to water cannons from a police tank as he was livestreaming from the streets of Van on Tuesday. The journalist also said, in a post on X on Tuesday, that he was receiving threats and insults on social media over his reporting. Takva talked to CPJ via messaging app on Wednesday and said he will file complaints about the insults and the threats via his lawyer.
• Kadir Cesur, Van reporter for critical news site Gazete Duvar, told CPJ via messaging app on Thursday that he was deliberately shot at with rubber bullets by the police on two separate occasions on Tuesday and Wednesday. “Police were shooting at the protesters with rubber bullets. We were separate from them as a group of journalists. One of the officers suddenly turned and opened fire on us,” said Cesur about the Tuesday incident, when he was shot in his left kneecap. Police also fired at journalists in another location in Van on Wednesday and hit Cesur once more on the left leg. He told CPJ that he hasn’t filed a complaint, and he doesn’t intend to.
• Umut Taştan, a reporter for the critical outlet KRT, reported being hit by the police with rubber bullets in Van on Wednesday. CPJ couldn’t reach Taştan for comment.
• Rabia Önver, a reporter for the pro-Kurdish news website JİNNEWS in Hakkari, was hit by a rubber bullet in the foot as she followed police taking protesters in custody on Wednesday. Önver spoke to CPJ via messaging app and said she was not hurt and won’t be filling a complaint. 
• Muhammed Şakir, a camera operator for the Iraq-based Kurdish outlet Rudaw, was hit on the leg with a gas bomb canister as he reported on the events in Van on Wednesday, his employer shared in a post on X. CPJ couldn’t reach Şakir for comment.
• Ece Üner, a presenter for the critical outlet Sözcü TV, on Wednesday said she received a death threat on X for commenting on the situation in Van. CPJ couldn’t reach Üner for comment.
• Ne Haber Ajansı, a local outlet from the southeastern city of Siirt, reported on Tuesday that their reporters were injured by police and hospitalized while covering protests in their city. CPJ spoke to reporter Yusuf Eren via messaging app on Thursday. Eren was hit in the foot by a tear gas canister, and Bünyamin Aybek, another reporter for the outlet, needed medical help after being exposed to tear gas, he said. 

Meanwhile, multiple news outlets reporting on claims of voting fraud on Sunday were blocked from publishing those stories online in Turkey by court order, local anti-censorship group Free Web Turkey reported.

CPJ emailed the Turkish Interior Ministry, which oversees the police, and the Istanbul Chief Prosecutor’s Office for comment but did not immediately receive any replies.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

On Sunday’s election day, the High Board of Elections (YSK) banned reporters from observing the votes being counted at some locations.

This is a legal right for Turkish journalists, according to a report by local media freedom advocacy group MLSA. The group cited Article 82 of Turkey’s election law, which says, “…Members of the media are free to obtain images and information around the ballot box for news purposes, provided that they do not interfere with the ballot box procedures.”

That same day, an unknown number of journalists from the official Anatolia Agency (AA), the pro-government Demirören News Agency, and pro-government İhlas News Agency were shot at while trying to get away from a location where they were covering an ongoing clash over an election dispute in the southeastern province of Diyarbakır. The AA reporters’ vehicle was hit by bullets, but nobody was injured.

“While it was a welcome change that elections in Turkey were held without attacks on the media by the security forces, the ban on reporters observing the vote count and the armed assault on journalists in Diyarbakır demand further investigation,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “Turkish authorities must prosecute those responsible for the Diyarbakır shooting and ensure that the legal rights of the media, which benefit the whole society and democracy, are always protected.”

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) suffered a major electoral defeat during the local elections. The party lost many municipalities and failed to retake major metropolises from the opposition despite its victory in the presidential and parliamentary elections of 2023.

During the second round of presidential elections on May 28, 2023, at least two journalists were physically attacked, others were obstructed from their work, and one was briefly detained by the police.

CPJ’s calls to the YSK and chief prosecutor’s office in Diyarbakır for comment did not immediately receive a reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

The Committee to Protect Journalists on Friday called on Turkish authorities to stop harassing the members of the Kurdish media with pointless arrests and trials and allow them to work freely.

“Turkish police took journalists Oktay Candemir, Arif Aslan, and Lokman Gezgin from their homes as if they were dangerous criminals and forced them to needlessly spend days being questioned about their professional work. This is not an isolated incident in Turkey,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “If Turkish authorities care to improve the country’s press freedom record, they must stop the systematic harassment of the critical Kurdish journalists with pointless judicial action that equates reporting to terrorism.”

The February incidents in Turkey include:

• Police raided the homes of local freelance Kurdish journalists Candemir, Aslan, and Gezgin and detained them on Tuesday in the eastern city of Van. On Friday, a prosecutor in Van questioned the journalists about their financial dealings, including payments they received from European outlets for their work and payments made to journalists they employed. The three journalists were released pending investigation and are accused of financing terrorism.

• A court in the southeastern city of Diyarbakır on Thursday released pending trial imprisoned journalist Müftüoğlu, an editor for the pro-Kurdish Mezopotamya News Agency and co-chair of the local press freedom group Dicle Fırat Journalists Association. CPJ joined 18 local and international groups that same day in a joint letter calling for Turkish authorities to immediately release the journalist. She had been in custody for more than 300 days.

• Police raided the homes of five reporters and detained them on February 13 in the western city of Izmir. Three of the reporters were put under house arrest, and the other two were released under judicial control on February 16. Appeals to these measures were rejected by an Izmir court on Thursday.

Another Diyarbakır court on Thursday acquitted Yılmaz, another editor for Mezopotamya, of terrorism charges. Yılmaz was released pending trial on December 14, 2023.

Candemir was detained and charged with “insulting” a deceased sultan in September 2020; the case was dropped in 2021.

CPJ emailed the chief prosecutor’s office in Van and Diyarbakır for comment but did not receive a reply.

Turkey recently dropped to 10th place as one of the world’s worst jailers of journalists, but that decline does not signal an improvement, according to press freedom experts.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Memeteziz, or Shadeke Maimaitiaizazi in Chinese, was one of six arrested on Feb. 20 for allegedly spying for China, Turkey’s Habertürk newspaper and TV channel said Wednesday.

Habertürk revealed the identities of four the six men arrested earlier this week, indicating they met with Chinese intelligence officials in Saudi Arabia. 

The media reports didn’t identify the ethnicity of the men, but Radio Free Asia has confirmed that they are all Uyghurs. One of the six, named Ehmetjan, was later released. A seventh one is still at large and wanted by police.

The suspects are accused of spying on prominent Uyghurs and Uyghur associations in Turkey and passing the information to Chinese intelligence officers. The arrests follow a probe by the Istanbul chief prosecutor’s Terrorism and Organized Crime Investigation Bureau, media reports said.

If they are indeed shown to have spied for China, the case would illustrate the lengths that Beijing will go to gather information on Uyghurs abroad as part of its transnational repression.

Uyghur diaspora

With roughly 50,000 Uyghurs living in Turkey — the largest Uyghur émigré population outside Central Asia — the Muslim-majority country has become a focus for Chinese espionage.

Radio Free Asia in February 2023 reported on how the Chinese government’s efforts to coerce Uyghurs to gather information on each other undermines trust and can dampen social and cultural gatherings, preventing Uyghur refugees from rebuilding their communities abroad.

In the past, Turkey offered Uyghurs a safe place to live outside China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, and is the only Turkic and Muslim country that has consistently raised the issue of the plight of Uyghurs at the United Nations and in bilateral talks with China.

So this crackdown on alleged spies for China represents a shift on Turkey’s part.

The Istanbul chief prosecutor’s office would not comment on the ongoing investigation. RFA could not reach the Chinese Embassy in Ankara for comment.

Family is shocked

Memeteziz’s son, who lives in Istanbul, told RFA that he does not believe his father is a criminal, and that it is premature to call him such until judicial authorities issue a verdict.

“We also recently came across the news and were shocked by it,” said the son, who declined to be named for fear of retribution. “It was a mix of sadness and disbelief, as we never imagined such a thing could happen.”

The son said he has lived apart from his father for two-and-a-half years, balancing work and studies, and that they occasionally checked in with each other. 

“As of now, we haven’t received any updates from the police or the judicial bodies,” he said. “There was no concrete evidence or confirmation, and judicial bodies haven’t said anything like what was reported in the news reports yet. All we've heard is that he was arrested.”

“Personally, I find this hard to believe because he has been running his own business for over 20 years,” the son added. “He has his own brand and products, and even when we lived together, he focused on his business and trade with Central Asia. Politics was never his concern due to his business commitments. Hence, I doubt the accuracy of these news reports.” 

Details of alleged activities

Based on an arrest notice issued by the Terrorism and Organized Crime Investigation Bureau, Memeteziz, in his mid- to late 50s, moved to Turkey from Xinjiang – where 11 million Uyghurs live – in the 2000s and had contact with someone from the Ministry of National Security, China’s spy agency. 

He met with an official named Li from the Chinese Communist Party’s Kargilik (Yecheng in Chinese) County Committee in Xinjiang’s Kashgar prefecture, both via phone and in person, the notice said.

According to information from the Turkish National Intelligence Service, it appears that Memeteziz met with Chinese intelligence officials outside Turkey. He traveled to Hong Kong in February 2023, then proceeded to Xinjiang’s Kargilik county, where he had face-to-face meetings with two spies named Li and Alimjan. 

Subsequently, Memeteziz met with Alimjan again in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. To conceal these meetings, Chinese intelligence officials in China and Saudi Arabia provided Memeteziz with two different passports, the Turkish news reports said.

Records indicate that Memeteziz continued to travel to and from Xinjiang with ease, particularly after 2017 when Chinese authorities began detaining Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims en masse in “re-education” camps under the guise of preventing religious extremism and terrorist activities, the reports said.

In 2023, Memeteziz received US$7,000 in Beijing and US$15,000 in Saudi Arabia in exchange for his espionage activities for China, said the reports.

Upon his return to Turkey in August 2023, Memeteziz obtained information about Uyghur organizations and their meetings, and the addresses of prominent Uyghurs living in Turkey. He collected photos and documents to share with Chinese intelligence officials, the news reports said.

The notice from the chief prosecutor’s office said that Memeteziz, under instructions from the Chinese intelligence agency, tried in January 2023 to move to an area where Uyghur religious teacher Abduqadir Yapchan resided, but he could not find accommodations.

China had accused Yapchan of being part of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, a Muslim separatist group that the U.S. State Department dropped from its list of terrorist organizations in October 2020 because of a lack of credible evidence that it continued to exist. Turkish police arrested him in August 2016 on charges of being a “terrorist” and kept him in detention or under house arrest.

In April 2021, a court in Turkey rejected a request by Beijing to extradite Yapchan to China to face terrorism charges, ending years of detention and legal limbo under the threat of harsh Chinese punishment.

Other suspects

The arrest warrant for a second suspect, Hebibulla Ürümci, said he acted as an intermediary in transferring money from a spy named Alimjan to Memeteziz. It also indicated that Ürümci collaborated with Memeteziz in Pakistan and made multiple international trips, according to Turkish media.

Hashim Sabitoğlu, the third man arrested, recently traveled to Saudi Arabia under the guise of making an Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, the holiest city for Muslims, but instead met with Chinese intelligence operatives. Memeteziz received payments from China through Hashim under the guise of business funds.

Abdullah Nasir, the fourth suspect, was reported to have continuously met with a Chinese intelligence officer named Zhong Xuegang, who identified himself as a Chinese consulate officer. 

Nasir was said to have stayed with Zhong in a hotel in Bursa, a city in Turkey about 92 kilometers (57 miles) south of Istanbul. Nasir was also acquainted with a spy named Alimjan and had a significant number of passport records on file, Turkish media said.

Memeteziz was assigned to gather information about Uyghurs in Syria by using Abdullah, an employee at a Uyghur bakery in Zeytinburnu, a working-class area on the European side of Istanbul. 

When RFA contacted Abdullah – the bakery worker, not the suspect Abdullah Nasir – he said he didn’t know Memeteziz but mentioned someone from Kargilik who visited the bakery every two or three days, trying to gather information about Uyghurs in Turkey and in other countries. 

“He would chat with me while buying naan,” Abdullah said, referring to Uyghur flatbread. “One day, he mentioned wanting to help people in need and asked if there were any religious kids from Kargilik. He asked me to let him know if I knew any. I told him I didn't know any.”n

“I can’t confirm if he’s a spy because there’s a lot of gossip in the community,” Abdullah said. “I did’t have a close relationship with him. He didn’t live in Zeytinburnu, and he told me he was coming from the Aksaray area to buy naan.”

Translated by RFA Uyghur. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Arslan Tash for RFA Uyghur.

The head of the Turkish Humanitarian Relief Foundation (IHH), Bulent Yildirim, has announced that the organisation will head a naval fleet to Gaza to break Israel’s siege of the bombarded Palestinian enclave.

Speaking at a huge public rally in Istanbul last week, Yildirim said: “The time for talking is over. We will go down to the sea, we will reach Gaza, and we will break the siege.”

Yildirim participated in the Gaza Freedom Flotilla in 2010. The boat he was on was boarded by Israeli troops and nine pro-Palestinian activists were killed at the time.

• READ MORE: Kia Ora Gaza organiser condemns ‘open genocide’ in Gaza Strip
• Other War on Gaza reports

Turkish NGO plans to send naval fleet toward Gaza to break siege. Video: Middle East Eye

He is hopeful that this new fleet will be successful in breaking the siege as part of Istael’s genocidal war against Palestinians and helping bring some relief to many Gazans who are starving.

Kia Ora Gaza is a member of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition.

“We hope to include Kiwis on the upcoming flotillas to break the siege of Gaza,” said Roger Fowler, a founder and facilitator of Kia Ora Gaza, who was at the planning meeting in Istanbul.

He appealed for donations to this mission through Kia Ora Gaza.

In September 2016, Kia Ora Gaza facilitated Green MP Marama Davidson in joining the Women’s Boat to Gaza peace flotilla, and in 2018 veteran human rights campaigner and union leader Mike Treen represented New Zealand.

Jordan airdrops aid to Gaza
Meanwhile, the Royal Jordanian Air Force has carried out airdrops of aid off the coast of the Gaza Strip — the biggest airdrop operation so far to deliver much-needed aid to millions of Palestinians amid restrictions by Israeli authorities on aid entering the territory by road.

The aid was dropped at 11 sites along the Gaza coast from its northern edge to the south for civilians to collect, and one French Air Force plane was also involved.

• Click here for information on how to donate to Kia Ora Gaza
• Contact Kia Ora Gaza

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The head of the Turkish Humanitarian Relief Foundation (IHH), Bulent Yildirim, has announced that the organisation will head a naval fleet to Gaza to break Israel’s siege of the bombarded Palestinian enclave.

Speaking at a huge public rally in Istanbul last week, Yildirim said: “The time for talking is over. We will go down to the sea, we will reach Gaza, and we will break the siege.”

Yildirim participated in the Gaza Freedom Flotilla in 2010. The boat he was on was boarded by Israeli troops and nine pro-Palestinian activists were killed at the time.

• READ MORE: Kia Ora Gaza organiser condemns ‘open genocide’ in Gaza Strip
• Other War on Gaza reports

Turkish NGO plans to send naval fleet toward Gaza to break siege. Video: Middle East Eye

He is hopeful that this new fleet will be successful in breaking the siege as part of Istael’s genocidal war against Palestinians and helping bring some relief to many Gazans who are starving.

Kia Ora Gaza is a member of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition.

“We hope to include Kiwis on the upcoming flotillas to break the siege of Gaza,” said Roger Fowler, a founder and facilitator of Kia Ora Gaza, who was at the planning meeting in Istanbul.

He appealed for donations to this mission through Kia Ora Gaza.

In September 2016, Kia Ora Gaza facilitated Green MP Marama Davidson in joining the Women’s Boat to Gaza peace flotilla, and in 2018 veteran human rights campaigner and union leader Mike Treen represented New Zealand.

Jordan airdrops aid to Gaza
Meanwhile, the Royal Jordanian Air Force has carried out airdrops of aid off the coast of the Gaza Strip — the biggest airdrop operation so far to deliver much-needed aid to millions of Palestinians amid restrictions by Israeli authorities on aid entering the territory by road.

The aid was dropped at 11 sites along the Gaza coast from its northern edge to the south for civilians to collect, and one French Air Force plane was also involved.

• Click here for information on how to donate to Kia Ora Gaza
• Contact Kia Ora Gaza

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The 26th Istanbul Court of Serious Crimes found the three journalists guilty of “assisting a [terrorist] organization without being a member” on Wednesday over their alleged ties to the exiled preacher Fethullah Gülen. The government accuses Gülen of maintaining a terrorist organization, which it calls FETÖ/PDY, and blames for a failed 2016 military coup.

The court sentenced well-known novelist and journalist Altan to six years and 3.5 months imprisonment; Ilıcak, former commentator for pro-Gülen daily Özgür Düşünce and shuttered broadcaster Can Erzincan TV, to five years and three months imprisonment; and Yazıcı, former layout editor for shuttered daily Zaman, to two years and one month.

The court did not immediately order the journalists’ arrests, leaving Altan and Ilıcak—who are both in their 70s—under judicial control, which means they are under a travel ban and must report to the police regularly. The court removed judicial control measures on Yazıcı.

“Turkish journalists Ahmet Altan, Nazlı Ilıcak, and Fevzi Yazıcı have already spent years of their lives behind bars on trumped-up terrorism charges stemming from their journalistic activities. It’s time to stop this endless circle of dragging the journalists into courtrooms and give them peace,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “Turkish authorities should stop fighting the appeals of Altan, Ilıcak, and Yazıcı and work towards improving the country’s press freedom record.”

The court acquitted Yakup Şimşek, Zaman’s former advertising director, of the terrorism charge against him.

The three journalists have been enmeshed in multiple appeals and retrials since they were initially arrested in 2016 and sentenced to life imprisonment in 2018. Ilıcak was released from prison in 2019, Altan in 2021, and Yazıcı in March 2023.

Ilıcak was imprisoned from December 4, 2023, to January 28, 2024, after losing an appeal for the charge of “slander” connected to a 2016 column, which contained allegations about a prosecutor who was overseeing a terrorism investigation.

CPJ’s email to the Istanbul chief prosecutor’s office requesting comment did not receive an immediate reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

But the latest numbers don’t tell the full story. Turkey has consistently vied with China for the top slot in CPJ’s list of shame and has taken first place five times in recent years, in 2012, 2013, 2016, 2017, and 2018.

The fall in imprisoned journalists in Turkey does not signal an improvement in media freedom, Barış Altıntaş, co-director of the Media and Law Studies Association (MLSA), a local group advocating for press freedom and freedom of speech, told CPJ.

“Even if there were zero journalists in prison today, 200 journalists may be arrested tomorrow,” she said. “The government determines the number of arrested journalists, even when it is low.”

Although dozens of journalists have been freed since 2022, most are still under investigation or awaiting trial, placing a stranglehold on the country’s critical media, CPJ’s research shows.

Why is Turkey—a NATO member with close ties to the West—frequently ranked alongside authoritarian states like Iran and Egypt in CPJ’s prison census?

Understanding Turkey’s high rates of incarceration of journalists requires a closer look at its domestic politics, particularly the long-running conflict with Kurdish insurgents.

Imprisoned due to political winds

The reasons that journalists are imprisoned in Turkey are “100% political,” said Ülkü Şahin, a lawyer with the Journalists’ Union of Turkey (TGS), who monitors media trials. “The arrests of journalists run in parallel with politics in Turkey. Whenever there are times of crisis in Turkey, the number of arrested journalists increases.”

The conservative Justice and Development Party (AKP), which has ruled Turkey since 2002, has repeatedly used the security forces and judicial system to outmaneuver its political opponents.

“The journalism trials all stem from politics,” one court reporter told CPJ on condition of anonymity, citing fear of reprisal. “The judges are either ignorant about the law or they manipulate it for their advantage.”

Shifting political winds in Turkey regularly sweep up journalists across the political spectrum. Left-wing nationalist journalists were targeted in the early 2010s, when hundreds including lawmakers, retired generals, and academics were arrested in relation to the alleged ultra-nationalist Ergenekon conspiracy to overthrow the government.

Some jailed reporters were linked to coup plots, while others were arrested for “influencing a fair trial”—effectively criminalized for independent coverage of police and court activities. Journalists who had been close to the previous regime were imprisoned alongside Kurdish citizens and socialists, two groups that are always present in the country’s prisons.

Today, Turkey’s three longest-serving journalists are socialists serving life sentences. Hatice Duman has been behind bars since 2003, Mustafa Gök since 2004, and Erdal Süsem since 2010.

In 2016, the trend of politically-influenced media arrests continued with the mass detention of journalists working for outlets associated with the U.S.-based Islamic cleric Fethullah Gülen, after his religious group fell out with its former ally the AKP.

Media detentions intensified after the 2016 attempted military coup, which President Recep Tayyip Erdogan blamed on Gülen, who denied involvement. That year, Turkey set a new global record of 84 journalists in jail—the most ever imprisoned by a nation in a year in CPJ’s census.

‘We will punish you through the judiciary’

Today, the government continues pressure the media to report its version of reality, a second court reporter told CPJ on condition of anonymity, citing fear of reprisal, adding that the arbitrary sentences handed down to journalists were the “best indicator of how the judiciary is under the influence of politics.”

The government’s attitude has been “either you practice journalism according to our instructions or we will punish you through the judiciary, with either investigations or prison,” said Fatma Demirelli, co-director of Platform for Independent Journalism (P24), a local press freedom group.

Mehmet Baransu, a former reporter and columnist for the shuttered newspaper Taraf, has been imprisoned since 2015 on multiple charges that stemmed from his reporting. In 2020, he was sentenced to more than 19 years in prison on charges that include alleged membership in Gülen’s movement. The government considers Taraf a mouthpiece for the Gülen movement, which it has designed as a terrorist organization and refers to as FETÖ/PDY.

Baransu has appealed the verdict. After the 2016 coup attempt, thousands of people with suspected ties to the Gülen community were interrogated but “there wasn’t one testimony regarding my or Taraf’s involvement [with Gülen],” Baransu told CPJ in an interview conducted via his lawyer.

Meanwhile, he remains in prison awaiting retrial on two cases which have been merged. One charge relates to a leaked National Security Council document that Taraf published and the other charge, which the journalist denies, is that he obtained a classified military document titled “The Sovereign Action Plan.”

Baransu believes the multiple journalism-related charges that he is facing are a punishment for his 2010 scoop about a planned coup. These reports, based on leaked documents and published in Taraf in 2010, led to the so-called Sledgehammer trials, in which more than 300 military officers were jailed.

Kurdish journalists labeled as terrorists

Kurdish journalists in particular are in the crosshairs. The question of Kurdish self-determination is a live one in Turkey, where Kurdish people have been subjected to decades of discrimination since the country’s founding. Turkish security forces have been fighting the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) since 1984 and peace efforts in the early 2010s failed. The PKK is designated as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States, and many Western governments.

Vaguely worded anti-terror and penal code statutes have allowed authorities to conflate journalistic reporting that they consider favorable to banned groups, like the PKK, with membership of a terrorist organization—for which the punishment is up to 15 years in prison.

Journalists’ union lawyer Şahin described terrorism-related charges as a “very functional” offense for authorities because of their “flexible” legal definition. Instead of asking prosecutors for evidence of a defendant’s “organic ties” or links to a terrorist organization, courts punish journalists simply for reporting the news, Şahin said.

Four out of five of the newly jailed journalists named in CPJ’s 2023 prison census were Kurdish— Sedat Yılmaz, Abdurrahman Gök, and Dicle Müftüoğlu were arrested over alleged PKK ties. Meanwhile, Celalettin Can was serving a 15-month sentence for guest editing the pro-Kurdish newspaper Özgür Gündem for one day in 2016 before it was shuttered due to alleged PKK ties.

(CPJ’s prison census provides a snapshot of journalists jailed as of December 1; since then, some Turkish reporters have been released. Gök and Yılmaz were freed pending trial on December 5 and 14 respectively, while Can was released conditionally on December 20.)

‘Revolving door’ of arrests and intimidation

When it comes to the Kurdish media, Turkey has an unofficial revolving door policy: as soon as one journalist from a newsroom is released pending trial, another is arrested, said Serdar Altan, one of 15 Kurdish members of the press — 14 journalists plus one media worker — imprisoned in June 2022 on charges of PKK membership.

This is an intimidation tactic, said Altan, who was freed on bail, after 13 months behind bars, on July 12, the day that the group’s mass trial on terrorism charges opened.

Sometimes the aim is to hinder an outlet’s work, at other times it’s to make an example of the journalists, but authorities generally avoid arresting every journalist at an outlet or shuttering it to avoid “negative publicity,” he said.

The main reason that the number of Turkish journalists in jail dropped in CPJ’s 2023 census is that a mass group that was imprisoned as of CPJ’s census date in 2022 had been released, awaiting trial, on that same date in 2023.

All were indicted on charges of terrorism, with their outlets labeled as propaganda tools because of their news policies, according to CPJ’s review of indictments, verdicts, and interrogation records.

CPJ visited the mainly Kurdish city of Diyarbakır, in southeastern Turkey, to observe several of these trials on terrorism charges in 2023. The courthouse had the usual harsh, white florescent lighting seen in similar buildings across Turkey, but security was noticeably tighter: two X-ray searches, full height turnstiles, an ID control, a ban on phones in the courtroom.

Journalists’ trials in this part of the country usually do not attract much public attention in western Turkey because the government is “effective” in presenting them as cases involving terrorist propaganda, said Altan, who is based in Diyarbakır.

“The Western media says, ‘Let’s not get into this if they took the journalist because of terrorism,’” he said.

Altan co-chairs the Dicle Fırat Journalists Association, a local press freedom group. His other co-chair, Dicle Müftüoğlu, is being held on terrorism charges in Sincan Women’s Closed Prison in the capital, Ankara. When her trial opened in Diyarbakır on December 7, she participated via teleconference.

Yılmaz—who worked with Müftüoğlu as an editor at the pro-Kurdish Mezopotamya News Agency—agreed that Turkish civil society was often reluctant to stand up for Kurdish journalists.

“Being a Kurdish journalist is perceived as a potential crime in the polarized, divided circumstances of Turkey,” said Yılmaz, who spent eight months in detention prior to his December 14 release on the first day of his trial on terrorism charges.

“Being a Kurdish journalist makes your non-existent crime even heavier.”

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Özgür Öğret.

“We are very glad journalist Azim Deniz survived a despicable attack, and it is a positive development that the alleged shooter was quickly apprehended by the authorities. However, authorities must determine if the attack was retaliation for Deniz’s journalism and whether the shooter had co-conspirators in order to bring all those involved swiftly to justice,” Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative, said on Tuesday. “Impunity in violence against journalists inevitably results in even more violence and a less informed public everywhere, every time. It’s never too late to improve Turkey’s impunity track record for crimes committed against the news media.”

A man shot Deniz, chief editor for the privately owned news website and online TV Deniz Postası, in his stomach and leg near his house in the central city of Kayseri on Monday morning, according to news reports and the journalist’s description of the event recorded from his hospital bed. The shooter fled the scene, and Deniz’s son took the journalist to the hospital, where, according to these sources, he is in a stable condition. 

Turkish police apprehended the alleged shooter in the nearby province of Yozgat on Tuesday, according to reports, which said the shooter confessed to the crime and was jailed pending trial.

Deniz released a statement on social media on Tuesday in which he described the shooter as a “triggerman for some people” and added that he trusts the authorities to find those people.

CPJ’s calls to Deniz, his legal representation, the outlet offices of Deniz Postası, and the shooter’s legal representative were not answered.

Deniz was previously attacked and beaten by a mob in Kayseri, which raided his outlet’s broadcast studio in April 2022.

CPJ’s email to the Kayseri chief prosecutor’s office did not receive an immediate reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

"We will, in the months to come, have to accelerate the scale of our support," Macron said in a speech on January 30 during a visit to Sweden. The "costs...of a Russian victory are too high for all of us."

EU leaders will meet in Brussels on February 1 for a meeting of the European Council, where they will discuss aid to Ukraine as the war approaches its second anniversary.

Ukraine continues to hold off large-scale Russian grounds attacks in the east but has struggled to intercept many of the deadly missiles Moscow fires at its cities on a regular basis.

Earlier in the day, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Russia had launched nearly 1,000 missiles and drones at Ukraine since the start of the year as Kyiv maintained a missile-threat alert for several regions on January 30, hours after Russian strikes killed at least three civilians.

"Russia has launched over 330 missiles of various types and approximately 600 combat drones at Ukrainian cities since the beginning of the year," Zelenskiy said on X, formerly Twitter.

"To withstand such terrorist pressure, a sufficiently strong air shield is required. And this is the type of air shield we are building with our partners," he wrote.

"Air defense and electronic warfare are our top priorities. Russian terror must be defeated -- this is achievable."

Live Briefing: Russia's Invasion Of Ukraine

RFE/RL's Live Briefing gives you all of the latest developments on Russia's full-scale invasion, Kyiv's counteroffensive, Western military aid, global reaction, and the plight of civilians. For all of RFE/RL's coverage of the war in Ukraine, click here.

A man was killed and his wife was wounded in the Russian shelling early on January 30 in the village of Veletenske in Ukraine's southern Kherson region, the regional prosecutor's office reported.

U.S. lawmakers have been debating for months a supplementary spending bill that includes $61 billion in aid to Ukraine. The aid would allow Ukraine to obtain a variety of U.S. weapons and armaments, including air-defense systems. The $61 billion -- if approved -- would likely cover Ukraine's needs through early 2025, experts have said.

Separately, regional Governor Oleksandr Prokudin said that Russian forces had fired 272 shells at Kherson from across the Dnieper River.

In the eastern region of Donetsk, one civilian was killed and another one was wounded by the Russian bombardment of the settlement of Myrnohrad, Vadym Filashin, the governor of the Ukrainian-controlled part of the region, said on January 30.

Also in Donetsk, in the industrial city of Avdiyivka, Russian shells struck a private house, killing a 47-year-old woman, Filashkin said on Telegram.

Russian forces have been trying to capture Adviyivka for the past several weeks in one of the bloodiest battles of the war triggered by Moscow's unprovoked invasion in February 2022.

Indiscriminate shelling of civilian areas has turned most of Avdiyivka into rubble.

Earlier on January 30, Ukrainian air defenses shot down 15 out of 35 drones launched by Russia, the military said.

The Russian drones targeted the Mykolayiv, Kirovohrad, Dnipropetrovsk, Poltava, and Kharkiv regions, the Ukrainian Air Force said.

Russian forces also launched 10 S-300 anti-aircraft missiles at civilian infrastructure in the Donetsk and Kherson regions, the military said, adding that there dead and wounded among the civilian population.

The Ukrainian Air Force later said that the Kirovohrad, Kharkiv, Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk, and Zaporizhzhya regions remained under a heightened level of alert due to the danger of more missile strikes.

Meanwhile, Russia's Defense Ministry said its air defenses had destroyed or intercepted 21 Ukrainian drones over the Moscow-occupied Crimean Peninsula and several Russian regions.

On the battlefield, Ukrainian forces fought 70 close-quarters battles along the entire front line, the General Staff of the Ukrainian military said in its daily report early on January 30. Ukrainian defenders repelled repeated Russian attacks in eight hot spots in the east, the military said.

In Washington, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on January 29 warned that Ukraine's gains over two years of fighting invading Russian troops were all in doubt without new U.S. funding, as NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg visited to lobby Congress.

WATCH: In February 2022, Ukrainian Army medic Yuriy Armash was trying to reach his unit as the Russian invasion was advancing fast. He was caught in Kherson, tortured, and held for months. While in captivity, he used his medical training to treat other Ukrainian prisoners. Some say he saved their lives.

Tens of billions of dollars in aid has been sent to Ukraine since the invasion in February 2022, but Republican lawmakers have grown reluctant to keep supporting Kyiv, saying it lacks a clear end game as the fighting against President Vladimir Putin's forces grinds on.

Blinken offered an increasingly dire picture of Ukraine's prospects without U.S. approval of the so-called supplemental funding amid reports that some progress was being made on the matter late on January 29.

In Brussels, European Union leaders will restate their determination to continue to provide "timely, predictable, and sustainable military support" to Ukraine at a summit on February 1, according to draft conclusions of the meeting.

"The European Council also reiterates the urgent need to accelerate the delivery of ammunition and missiles," the draft text, seen by Reuters, also says.

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

The 1^st Tatvan Court of First Instance in the eastern province of Bitlis found Aygül, chief editor of the privately owned local news website Bitlis News and chair of the local trade group Bitlis Journalists Society, guilty of “insulting” two men who attacked him in June 2023 and sentenced the journalist to two months and five days in prison on Wednesday. The 2^nd Tatvan Court of Serious Crimes imposed suspended sentences on the two on Thursday, according to local news reports. The attackers, Yücel Baysal and Engin Kaplan, both bodyguards for Tatvan Mayor Mehmet Emin Geylani of the ruling Justice and Development Party, were released from jail pending trial in September. The mayor has denied involvement in the attack.

“Yesterday, a court in Turkey sentenced journalist Sinan Aygül to prison time for allegedly insulting the men who assaulted and hospitalized him last year. Today, another court let these two men walk free with suspended sentences. This is beyond impunity; this is criminalizing the victim,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative, on Thursday. “Turkish authorities should stop impunity for physical attacks on journalists and ensure justice is done for Aygül, who is the real victim here.”

According to the local news reports, Baysali, who beat the journalist in an attack recorded on camera, and Kaplan, who blocked people trying to stop the beating, were both found guilty of “intentional injury” and each sentenced to 17 months and 15 days in prison. Kaplan was also found guilty of “threatening [someone] with a gun” on two counts and was sentenced to 20 months for each. Under Turkish law, the execution of all the sentences were suspended and will be dropped unless the defendants commit other crimes in the next five years.

Aygül told CPJ by phone after Thursday’s hearing that he was shocked and concerned about the outcome. “This verdict is a threat to our security of life. I’m speaking openly: we have no security of life because the killers now know that they won’t be punished when we are killed,” he said.

Aygül’s lawyers plan to file separate appeals against his conviction and the sentences imposed on his attackers, but they are not hopeful that the appeals will succeed, he told CPJ.

CPJ emailed the Bitlis chief prosecutor’s office but didn’t receive any reply.

CPJ was unable to contact the legal representatives for Baysal and Kaplan.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Arlene Getz/CPJ Editorial Director.

“We are pleased that Turkey’s highest court found unconstitutional the legal article that had been used to take down online news with public value under the guise of protecting individuals’ rights,” Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative, said on Thursday. “The road to legally protect the press and the free flow of information in Turkey remains long and challenging, but we applaud the court’s step in the right direction.”

The legal changes introduced in 2020, which CPJ raised concerns about at the time, amended Turkey’s 2007 internet law to allow individuals to ask local courts to remove online content that violated their “personal rights” or privacy.

The Constitutional Court said in its ruling on Wednesday that this clause interfered with freedom of expression and the press, according to news reports. The new ruling will take effect in nine months.

The law forced media outlets to remove hundreds of pieces of critical content, according to the Freedom of Expression Association, a Turkish nonprofit. Its 2021 report found that 432 out of 548 news articles that were blocked by the law covered topics that was in the public interest.

The court also cancelled another clause in the law which gave the regulatory Information Technologies and Communication Authority (BTK) the power to take down content without a court order.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Live Briefing: Russia's Invasion Of Ukraine

RFE/RL's Live Briefing gives you all of the latest developments on Russia's full-scale invasion, Kyiv's counteroffensive, Western military aid, global reaction, and the plight of civilians. For all of RFE/RL's coverage of the war in Ukraine, click here.

Zelenskiy met with his Lithuanian counterpart Gitanas Nauseda on January 10 to discuss military aid, training, and joint demining efforts during the previously unannounced trip, which will also take him to Estonia and Latvia.

“We have proven that Russia can be stopped, that deterrence is possible,” he said after talks with Nauseda on what is the Ukrainian leader's first foreign trip of 2024.

"Today, Gitanas Nauseda and I focused on frontline developments. Weapons, equipment, personnel training, and Lithuania's leadership in the demining coalition are all sources of strength for us," Zelenskiy later wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

Lithuania has been a staunch ally of Ukraine since the start of Russia's unprovoked full-scale invasion, which will reach the two-year mark in February.

Nauseda said EU and NATO member Lithuania will continue to provide military, political, and economic support to Ukraine, and pointed to the Baltic country's approval last month of a 200-million-euro ($219 million) long-term military aid package for Ukraine.

Russia's invasion has turned Ukraine into one of the most mined countries in the world, generating one of the largest demining challenges since the end of World War II.

"Lithuania is forming a demining coalition to mobilize military support for Ukraine as efficiently and quickly as possible," Nauseda said.

"The Western world must understand that this is not just the struggle of Ukraine, it is the struggle of the whole of Europe and the democratic world for peace and freedom," Nauseda said.

Ukraine has pleaded with its allies to keep supplying it with weapons amid signs of donor fatigue in some countries.

There is continued disagreement between Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. Congress on continuing military aid for Kyiv, while a 50-billion-euro ($55 billion) aid package from the European Union remains blocked due to a Hungarian veto.

But a NATO allies meeting in Brussels on January 10 made it clear that they will continue to provide Ukraine with major military, economic, and humanitarian aid. NATO allies have outlined plans to provide "billions of euros of further capabilities" in 2024 to Ukraine, the alliance said in a statement.

Zelensky warned during the news conference with Nauseda that delays in Western aid to Kyiv would only embolden Moscow.

"He (Russian President Vladimir Putin) is not going to stop. He wants to occupy us completely," Zelenskiy said.

"And sometimes, the insecurity of partners regarding financial and military aid to Ukraine only increases Russia's courage and strength."

Since the start of the year, Ukraine has been subjected to several massive waves of Russian missile and drone strikes that have caused civilian deaths and material damage.

Zelenskiy said on January 10 that Ukraine badly needs advanced air defense systems.

"In recent days, Russia hit Ukraine with a total of 500 devices: we destroyed 70 percent of them," Zelenskiy said. "Air defense systems are the number one item that we lack."

Meanwhile, in Ukraine, an all-out air raid alert was declared on the morning of January 10, with authorities instructing citizens to take shelter due to an elevated danger of Russian missile strikes.

"Missile-strike danger throughout the territory of Ukraine! [Russian] MiG-31Ks taking off from Savasleika airfield [in Russia's Nizhny Novgorod region].

Don't ignore the air raid alert!' the Ukrainian Air Force said in its warning message on Telegram.

With reporting by AFP and Reuters

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

Istanbul police took Karabay, an editor for independent news website Gerçek Gündem (The Real Agenda), into custody on December 28, 2023 according to news reports. The next day, he was jailed pending trial by court order on the suspicion of “making targets of those who were tasked to combat terrorism” and defamation. Karabay’s detention followed his December 27 article about an ongoing corruption and bribery trial of members of the judiciary; he had based his story on publicly available court minutes, reports said. 

“Turkish authorities must release journalist Furkan Karabay, whose arrest was blatantly retaliatory for his journalism,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “Karabay’s arrest sends an intimidating message to Turkey’s journalists to abstain from reporting on the judiciary or face severe consequences. This criminalization of basic journalistic practices must end.”

Journalists in Turkey who report on members of the judiciary or judicial developments are frequently charged with “making targets of those who were tasked to combat terrorism.”

CPJ’s email to the Istanbul chief prosecutor’s office did not receive an immediate reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Istanbul police took Karabay, an editor for independent news website Gerçek Gündem (The Real Agenda), into custody on December 28, 2023 according to news reports. The next day, he was jailed pending trial by court order on the suspicion of “making targets of those who were tasked to combat terrorism” and defamation. Karabay’s detention followed his December 27 article about an ongoing corruption and bribery trial of members of the judiciary; he had based his story on publicly available court minutes, reports said. 

“Turkish authorities must release journalist Furkan Karabay, whose arrest was blatantly retaliatory for his journalism,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “Karabay’s arrest sends an intimidating message to Turkey’s journalists to abstain from reporting on the judiciary or face severe consequences. This criminalization of basic journalistic practices must end.”

Journalists in Turkey who report on members of the judiciary or judicial developments are frequently charged with “making targets of those who were tasked to combat terrorism.”

CPJ’s email to the Istanbul chief prosecutor’s office did not receive an immediate reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

“The people charged with the vicious assault that landed journalist Sinan Aygül in hospital in June were released on bail by a Turkish court last week. This week, Aygül was sentenced to prison for his reporting of an exclusive story that was clearly in the public interest. There is something wrong with this picture,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “Turkish authorities should not fight Aygül’s appeal and should accept the concept of a free press that can operate without fear of retaliation.”

In May, a court in the eastern city of Tatvan, in the province of Bitlis, found Aygül, chief editor of the privately owned website Bitlis News and chair of the Bitlis Journalists Society, guilty of trespassing in a hotel’s kitchen, where the journalist exposed the presence of meat from Turkey’s Red Crescent that was supposed to have been distributed to people in need.

The court sentenced Aygül in May during a “simple trial,” meaning it involved a judgment without a hearing, resulting in a reduced sentence of four and a half months. Aygül, who remained free pending trial, told CPJ in May that he had filed an appeal, which would lead to a regular trial, but that he was concerned he would end up serving six months instead. As he feared, the court sentenced him to six months in prison on September 19.

Aygül told CPJ via messaging app Tuesday that he does not have high hopes for the next appeal, which his lawyer is going to file to a regional appeals court once the Tatvan court publishes a detailed explanation of the verdict on an undetermined date. He said he believes he will go to prison.

Meanwhile, two men seen on video assaulting Aygül in June were released from jail pending trial last week.

CPJ’s email to the prosecutor’s office in Bitlis did not receive a reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Arlene Getz/CPJ Editorial Director.

On the evening of August 29, Karakeçili, chief editor for the local news website Virantv in the southeastern city of Viranşehir in the province of Şanlıurfa, was assaulted and threatened by İsmail Ekinci, the bodyguard and nephew of the city’s mayor, allegedly due to Karakeçili’s reporting on corruption, according to news reports and the journalist, who spoke to CPJ over the phone.

Separately, Ankara prosecutors have dismissed the criminal complaint filed by Hale Gönültaş, reporter for the independent news website Artı Gerçek, regarding death threats she received from an Islamic group in connection with her reporting, according to news reports and the journalist, who spoke to CPJ over the phone.

“Journalists’ safety remains one of the core challenges to press freedom in Turkey, and the actions against editor Mehmet Karakeçili and reporter Hale Gönültaş are common examples of this problem,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “Turkish authorities should thoroughly investigate both cases, hold those responsible to account, and ensure the safety of the journalists.”

Karakeçili told CPJ on Tuesday, September 5, that Ekinci hit him with the butt of a gun, breaking his nose and causing a wound on his forehead that required six stitches. The attacker told Karakeçili, “You’ll die the next time you write about the municipality,” according to the journalist, who said he believes the attack was instigated by his reporting on alleged corruption in the municipality.

Ekinci was released from custody under judicial control by the local authorities, and his licensed weapon was confiscated, according to the reports.

Previously, on January 20, a Viranşehir court found İsmail Ekinci and Abdülaziz Ekinci, another nephew of the mayor, Salih Ekinci, guilty of threatening Karakeçili over his reporting about the mayor and sentenced them to minor monetary fines, but delayed the implementation of the sentences, according to the verdict, which CPJ has reviewed.

Meanwhile, Gönültaş told CPJ on Tuesday that she had received several threats over the phone and social media from people who accused her of hurting the case of Halis Bayancuk, the leader of the Tevhid Community known by the code name “Ebu Hanzala,” who was then imprisoned with charges of terrorism, with a report she published in May 2022. She had written about a woman who had managed to break free from the Tevhid Community, which is considered close to the militant Islamic State group, and how the Tevhid Community was allegedly manipulating and recruiting women to their cause.

Gönültaş filed a criminal complaint about the threats on May 3, 2023, but the prosecutors had dismissed it by June 13, according to the reports.

Bayancuk was released on July 10 pending a retrial, independent news website Gerçek Gündem reported. Gönültaş told CPJ that the threats have stopped since Bayancuk’s release.

CPJ called and emailed the office of Viranşehir mayor and emailed the Ankara chief prosecutor’s office for comment but did not receive a reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Arlene Getz/CPJ Editorial Director.

“Turkish authorities’ relentless attempts to control the flow of news and information in the country have led to yet another court order blocking access to Voice of America’s Turkish website,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “Authorities must make peace with the idea of a free press in Turkey and allow both local and foreign media to distribute news freely. All restrictions targeting media outlets should be ended without delay.”

On August 22, an Ankara court granted a request to block VOA from the Radio and Television Supreme Council, the government telecommunications regulator known as RTÜK, citing alleged unpaid licensing fees. The court gave VOA a 72-hour deadline to obtain a license, and then blocked the outlet on Monday, August 28.

On Tuesday, CPJ’s attempts to access VOA’s Turkish-language website from within Turkey failed without a VPN. The broadcaster’s English website remains accessible.

CPJ’s email to RTÜK did not receive a reply. VOA reported that it is possible to appeal the ruling, but did not say whether it planned to do so.

VOA’s Turkish-language website, voaturkce.com, was launched at a new address after the outlet’s previous websites were blocked last year. 

In February 2022, RTÜK ordered VOA and two other foreign outlets to apply for broadcast licenses or face blocks, leading to a series of blocks on several of the VOA’s websites in July 2022 after the outlet did not comply. 

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

On Wednesday, August 23, a suspected Turkish drone strike in Syria’s Kurdish-controlled northeast hit a car belonging to the all-female broadcaster JIN TV, killing driver Najm el-Din Faisal Haj Sinan and wounding journalist Dalila Agid, according to news reports and Dijla Eito, a member of JIN TV’s board, who spoke to CPJ.

Eito said Agid had undergone surgery and was in an intensive care unit as of Friday.

“We are deeply saddened by the tragic drone attack that killed driver Najm el-Din Faisal and injured journalist Dalila Agid while they were working in northeastern Syria,” said Sherif Mansour, CPJ Middle East and North Africa program coordinator, in Washington, D.C. “Turkish authorities should swiftly launch an investigation into this attack, determine who was responsible and if the reporting team was targeted, and hold the perpetrators to account.”

Eito told CPJ that the JIN TV team was driving near the Turkish border, between the Syrian cities of Amuda, where the broadcaster has a studio, and Qamishli, when they were attacked. Eito said Agid had been covering an event to commemorate the death of two Kurdish officials in another drone attack in June.

“She regained consciousness temporarily after suffering a severe injury to her neck and losing her left arm. However, she soon slipped back into an unconscious state. Numerous explosive fragments remained within her body,” Eito told CPJ.

In a statement, the Kurdish-led autonomous administration in northeastern Syria condemned the attack and called on the international community to intervene and ensure accountability.

CPJ emailed the Turkish president’s office for comment but did not receive a reply. CPJ was unable to find any contact information for the Turkish Defense Ministry or any comments it had issued about the attack.

Turkey has previously said that its strikes in northern Syria target Kurdish fighters that it considers terrorists.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

Pehlivan, a columnist for the pro-opposition daily Cumhuriyet, revealed in an August 2 column that he was ordered to report back to prison no later than August 15 to serve eight months of a 2020 sentence for violating the country’s national intelligence laws.

In March 2020, Turkish authorities arrested Pehlivan, then chief editor of independent news website Odatv, along with five other journalists over their coverage of the death of a Turkish intelligence officer in Libya. Pehlivan and four other journalists were found guilty of violating national intelligence laws in September 2020; that month, Pehlivan was released on parole after having served six months.

“Barış Pehlivan did not deserve to be imprisoned over his reporting three years ago, and he definitely does not deserve to lose eight more months of his life behind bars,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “Turkish authorities must stop arresting members of the press and instead provide a safe environment where journalists can do their job without fear of judicial retaliation.”

In the 2020 case, Pehlivan was initially sentenced to three years and nine months in prison; due to Turkish sentencing laws, his term has been reduced so that eight months remain.

In his August 2 column about the order to return to prison, Pehlivan said the authorities considered him in violation of his parole due to separate charges prosecutors filed against him and another journalist in 2022 for allegedly “making targets of those who are tasked to combat terrorism,” an accusation of exposing information that would harm an official.

On Monday, August 7, Pehlivan’s lawyers filed an appeal for him to remain released under judicial control, which would allow him to stay out of prison but would ban him from traveling and require him to report to police, according to news reports.

On Wednesday, CPJ joined 18 other press freedom, freedom of expression, and human rights organizations as signatories of a joint statement urging Turkish authorities not to re-imprison Pehlivan and to stop the “systematic judicial harassment” against journalists. 

CPJ emailed the Istanbul chief prosecutor’s office for comment but did not receive any reply. At the time of CPJ’s latest prison census, on December 1, 2022, at least 40 journalists were imprisoned in Turkey.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Arlene Getz/CPJ Editorial Director.

On Tuesday, July 25, Turkish police detained Arslan, a reporter for the pro-Kurdish Mezopotamya News Agency, at his house in the capital city of Ankara, in relation to an investigation by the chief prosecutor’s office in the southeastern city of Diyarbakır over allegations that the journalist was “making targets of those who were tasked to combat terrorism,” according to multiple news reports. A court ordered him to be imprisoned pending investigation.

The investigation concerns a tweet Arslan posted on July 18 about the reassignments of a judge and prosecutor who are married to each other and are involved in an ongoing mass trial of journalists in Diyarbakır, according to those sources.

Turkish police also detained four other journalists in different cities for retweeting Arslan’s post: Mezopotamya reporter Delal Akyüz in the western city of Izmir, independent news website T24 editor Sibel Yükler in Ankara, independent news website Bianet editor Evrim Kepenek in Istanbul, and freelance journalist Evrim Deniz in Diyarbakır.

All but Kepenek were released on Tuesday after questioning and remain under judicial control with a foreign travel ban, according to news reports. Kepenek spent one night in jail before being released with the same restrictions on Wednesday, Bianet reported.

“Turkish authorities should immediately and unconditionally release reporter Fırat Can Arslan, who is being detained for reporting on publicly available information and did nothing to ‘make targets’ of anyone,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “Authorities should cease detaining journalists or raiding their houses as if they are criminals. Posting news on the internet or retweeting it cannot be a crime. All actions taken against journalists in retaliation for their engagement with Arslan’s reporting must be reversed at once.”

During the first hearing of the trial of 17 Kurdish journalists in Diyarbakır earlier in July, it was revealed that the prosecutor who penned the indictment and one of the three judges hearing the trial were married. Arslan tweeted about the couple being transferred to another city from Diyarbakır after it was publicly announced by Turkey’s Board of Judges and Prosecutors, the regulatory body that oversees the appointment, promotion, and dismissal of judges and public prosecutors.  

Kepenek was detained at her house in Istanbul in plastic handcuffs, and was later handcuffed as she was brought to the courthouse. Police also raided the houses of Akyüz and Yükler, reports said. Deniz told the Media and Legal Studies Association, a local free expression and press freedom advocacy group, that the Diyarbakır police could not raid her house because they did not know her address.

CPJ emailed the Diyarbakır chief prosecutor’s office but did not receive a response.

The Kurdish journalists on trial in Diyarbakır are facing charges of membership in the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK); if convicted, they face up to 15 years in prison. Turkey was the world’s fourth-worst jailer of journalists, with 40 behind bars at the time of CPJ’s December 1, 2022, prison census. Of those, more than half were Kurdish journalists.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Arlene Getz/CPJ Editorial Director.

On Monday, June 26, police detained Yanardağ, chief editor for the critical online outlet and TV broadcaster TELE1, at the Istanbul studios of his outlet, after he criticized authorities over the prison conditions of Abdullah Öcalan, the convicted leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which Turkey considers as a terrorist organization.

On Tuesday, an Istanbul court ordered his formal arrest pending an investigation into charges of “making propaganda” for a terrorist organization.

“Turkish authorities must release Merdan Yanardağ, who is being held simply for his political commentary,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “Yanardağ’s arrest is a challenge to all Turkish journalists and commentators and can only be seen as a means of intimidating them from discussing sensitive issues. Authorities must work to improve the country’s freedom of speech rather than continue to hinder it.”

During a June 20 broadcast, Yanardağ spoke about Öcalan, calling him “the longest serving political prisoner,” and arguing that he should have been released by that date. On June 26, the journalist said his words were taken out of context, and he was not praising Öcalan or any terrorist organization.

CPJ’s email to the Istanbul chief prosecutor’s office did not immediately receive any reply.

Turkish authorities have repeatedly arrested journalists across the country for their alleged ties to purported terrorist groups. In April, authorities detained dozens of journalists allegedly tied to the PKK. At the time of CPJ’s latest prison census, on December 1, 2022, at least 40 journalists were held in Turkish prisons.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

This week, the Turkish government announced it will raise its monthly minimum wage by 34 percent to address inflation and the economic crisis in the country. Despite the long-standing problems in Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan recently won a contested reelection, further consolidating his 20-year rule. This week on Intercepted, Gönül Tol, the founding director of the Middle East Institute’s Turkey program, joins Murtaza Hussain to discuss the Turkish elections. Tol runs through Erdogan’s decadeslong history in office, how economic and social problems in Turkey contributed to the election’s rhetoric, and what Turkey’s future may look like under Erdogan’s autocratic government.

Transcript coming soon.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Intercepted.

On June 17, two men attacked Aygül, chief editor of the privately owned website Bitlis News and chair of the Bitlis Journalists Society, in the eastern city of Tatvan, according to multiple reports and videos, as well as the journalist, who posted about the attack on social media and spoke to CPJ by phone.

Aygül told CPJ that he sustained injuries to his head and shoulder, a shattered cheekbone that requires surgery, and a bruise under his right kneecap that has hindered his walking.

On Sunday, June 18, police arrested Yücel Baysal, who allegedly beat the journalist, and Engin Kaplan, who they said threatened bystanders not to interfere, and held them pending trial, according to daily newspaper Cumhuriyet. Baysal, a Tatvan municipal employee, and Kaplan, a police officer, are both assigned as bodyguards to Tatvan Mayor Mehmet Emin Geylani, from the ruling Justice and Development Party.

Aygül told CPJ that he believed Geylani had ordered the attack in response to his recent coverage of alleged corruption in the municipality. He said that Baysal told him, “You will die if you write about the mayor once more.” In a statement released shortly after the attack, Geylani denied any involvement.

“Turkish authorities should thoroughly and swiftly investigate the cowardly beating of journalist Sinan Aygül and hold everyone involved to account,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “Authorities should ensure that the investigation is transparent and free from political influence. Journalists must be able to cover local government figures without fear of physical attack.”

Baysal is also the mayor’s nephew, while Kaplan is the son-in-law of the mayor’s sister, according to Cumhuriyet. Baysal was dismissed from his post following the attack, and Kaplan was suspended from the police force, those reports said.

In several tweets on June 18, the mayor accused Aygül of making threatening comments to him after the attack. Aygül told CPJ on Tuesday that he had not threatened the mayor.

Aygül said he believed the attack was in response to his tweets about alleged corruption involving a bid to purchase real estate owned by the municipality. Aygül frequently posts his reporting on Twitter, where he has about 44,000 followers. The bid was canceled after the attack, Aygül tweeted on Monday.

CPJ emailed the Bitlis chief prosecutor’s office and the Tatvan municipality for comment but didn’t receive any replies. CPJ was unable to immediately find contact information for the legal representatives of Baysal and Kaplan.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

“Safiye Alagaş lost a year of her life, which cannot be compensated by any means, just like numerous other journalists in Turkey who were punished without a conviction by the common method of prolonged pretrial detention,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative, who attended the trial. “Turkish authorities must stop prosecuting Alagaş and other journalists for simply covering the news, and release all jailed members of the press.” 

Authorities arrested Alagaş in June 2022 alongside 14 other journalists and charged her with being a member of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which the government has designated as a terrorist organization, according to the 383-page indictment reviewed by CPJ. 

In court on Thursday, Alagaş denied the accusation, and the prosecution presented her outlet’s news articles, photos, social media posts, and other content as evidence. She is expected back in court on November 9, 2023. If convicted, she faces 7.5 to 15 years imprisonment.  

CPJ’s email to the Diyarbakır chief prosecutor did not immediately receive a response.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

The post Assessing the Turkish Elections appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Hilal Elver – Richard Falk.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Deconstructed.

The government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan swept up and jailed a team of international observers on hand to monitor election day activity in Turkey on Sunday, members of the team told The Intercept in a statement. Following a day-long detention – during which more than a dozen international elected officials and civil society representatives from Spain were placed in solitary confinement and refused bathroom breaks – the officials were escorted to the airport and flown out of the country, landing in Spain on Monday and Tuesday. 

The delegation had not been granted official observer accreditation by the Erdogan government, but were formally invited by the HDP, the leading Kurdish party and a key member of the opposition coalition. 

The election held on Sunday was the closest contest Erdogan has faced in the two decades he has been in power. Immediately, the opposition coalition, led by Kemal Kilicdaroglu, charged election irregularities, zeroing in on what Kilicdaroglu said was an extremely large number of objections to ballot boxes in Istanbul and Ankara — urban areas where the opposition dominated. “You are blocking the will of Turkey,” Kilicdaroglu said. 

Erdogan fell short of the 50 percent needed to avoid a runoff, officially winning more than 49.5 percent of the vote with fewer than 100,000 overseas ballots remaining to be tallied. A runoff will be held on May 28. Sinan Ogan, whose 5 percent of the vote forced the runoff by keeping both candidates under 50 percent, also made allegations of vote-counting manipulation by the government.

The Spanish observers included members of the left-leaning Podemos party; EH Bildu, a Basque-nationalist coalition; and a senator from Esquerra Republicana, a Catalonian leftist party. The observers were in the Kurdish majority city of Siirt when they were arrested and taken to a police station on Sunday, the day of the election. Officers then went to the hotel where the observers were staying and arrested the remaining members of the delegation, who joined their comrades in detention at the police station. They were held until Monday morning and released on the condition they leave the country. 

Ismaèl Cortes, a national congressional deputy with Podemos, and Miriam Ojeda, a representative of the International Secretariat of Podemos, were among those detained. Spain and Turkey are both members of NATO.

“This new and intolerable example of repression demonstrates the authoritarian drift of the regime of Erdogan, which undermines the democratic principles and fundamental rights of the Turkish citizenry and, especially, of the peoples present in this territory, such as the Kurdish,” read a statement from the observers provided to The Intercept.

The observers also said in the statement that several members of the Kurdish YSP party were also arrested. Their fate is not known, and the Erdogan government did not respond to requests for comment.

Polls taken ahead of the election had the opposition ahead of Erdogan, sometimes by as much as 5 or 6 percentage points, leaving observers stunned at Erdogan’s beating the opposition by at least 4 points in the first round. Selim Koru, an analyst at the Ankara-based Economic Policy Research Foundation of Turkey and a critic of Erdogan, said that he doesn’t believe most of the vote-counting claims being made by the opposition will hold up. “The big thing is that most people in the opposition space came to trust the polls. Most of the evidence really favored the opposition,” he said. “But polling these days has a problem detecting right-wing bias. Something similar happened in the U.S. in 2016. We thought the pollsters took that into account, but I guess they didn’t.”

Ahead of the election, Erdogan’s government pressured Twitter to censor opposition voices and critical journalists — a request to which Twitter’s outgoing CEO Elon Musk instantly capitulated. “In response to legal process and to ensure Twitter remains available to the people of Turkey, we have taken action to restrict access to some content in Turkey today,” Twitter posted.

Musk acknowledged that the government had threatened to take the site down, as Erdogan did in 2014 when Twitter refused to comply with a similar demand. The previous Twitter leadership, however, took Turkey’s government to court and prevailed in its Supreme Court.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ryan Grim.

On Wednesday, May 10, Yavaş, a writer and publisher of the weekly newspaper Çan’dan Haberler, published a post on the outlet’s Facebook page criticizing political banners by the pro-government Grey Wolves nationalist group in the Çanakkale city of Çan. Those banners suggested voting for opposition candidates in Sunday’s elections would be equal to voting for the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which Turkey classifies as a terrorist group.

Later that day, the Çan head of the Grey Wolves, Hasan Dinç, invited Yavaş to meet for tea at a local café and then punched and kicked him, knocked him to the ground, and threatened to kill him, according to news reports and the journalist, who spoke to CPJ. Yavaş said he went to a hospital after the incident but was not seriously injured, and later filed a criminal complaint.

Contacted by messaging app, Dinç claimed that a “brawl” broke out between him and Yavaş because the journalist provoked it. Yavaş told CPJ that he did not fight back during the altercation.

“Authorities in Çanakkale, Turkey, should swiftly and thoroughly investigate the criminal complaint filed by journalist Muhammed Yavaş, who was physically assaulted in public because of his reporting,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “Yavaş’ safety should be guaranteed, and authorities should ensure that attacks on the press will carry swift consequences.”

In a video statement on Thursday, Oğuzer Akgün, the Çanakkale provincial head of the Grey Wolves, was seen sitting with Dinç. In the video, Akgün accused Yavaş of inciting the incident, saying the “situation turned into a brawl” over the journalist’s alleged provocations.

Akgün also accused Yavaş of being paid to make that Facebook post, which Yavaş denied. Akgün said the journalist was “spending an extraordinary effort to stir up trouble” prior to that May 10 meeting with Dinç.

Çan’dan Haberler (News from Çan) has about 10,000 followers on Facebook and frequently posts news about local political issues.

CPJ emailed the chief prosecutor’s office in Çanakkale for comment but did not receive any reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

Since April 20, authorities have sentenced journalists Sinan Aygül, Bülent Mumay, Ferhat Çelik, and İdris Yayla over various criminal charges relating to their work and issued them prison terms ranging from 4.5 to 20 months, according to news reports and journalists who spoke with CPJ. The journalists remain free, as one received a suspended sentence, and the others have pending appeals.

The four journalists covered or commented on alleged corruption in the judiciary, the former administration of Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, and the local head of a government-sponsored charity.

 Elections for the parliament and presidency are scheduled for  May 14.

“The recent sentencings of journalists Sinan Aygül, Bülent Mumay, Ferhat Çelik, and İdris Yayla are the latest examples of Turkish authorities’ misguided tradition of criminalizing journalism,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “Authorities should not fight these journalists’ appeals. Regardless of who triumphs in the upcoming elections, the new administration should make the necessary reforms to ensure that the media doesn’t operate with a constant fear of judicial harassment.”

On May 2, Turkish authorities informed Aygül that, on August 20, the Second Criminal Court of First Instance in the eastern city of Tatvan had found him guilty of trespassing at a business in August 2020 and sentenced him to 4 months, 15 days in prison, according to news reports, court documents reviewed by CPJ, and Aygül, who communicated with CPJ by messaging app. 

The charges are connected to reporting by Aygül, chief editor of the privately owned website Bitlis News and chair of the Bitlis Journalists Society, about meat from Turkey’s Red Crescent that was supposed to be distributed to people in need but was allegedly instead delivered to a hotel kitchen.

In January 2023, Battal Taşar filed a criminal complaint against Aygül for allegedly trespassing at the hotel. Taşar was also the Tatvan branch chairperson of the Red Crescent and owns the hotel with his brother Cemal Taşar, a parliamentary deputy of Bitlis province from the ruling Justice and Development Party.

Aygül did not deny entering the hotel kitchen without permission, but argued that he acted for the public good. Taşar resigned from his position at the Red Crescent in September 2020 amid what he called a smear campaign, reports said.

The court sentenced Aygül during a “simple trial,” meaning the court came to a judgment without a hearing, resulting in a reduced sentence. Aygül told CPJ he filed an appeal, which will lead to a regular trial, but he fears he will serve six months instead. He remains free pending that trial. 

Separately, on May 5, the Second Court of Serious Crimes in the eastern city of Van sentenced Çelik and Yayla on charges of “making targets of those who were tasked to combat terrorism,” according to news reports. The charges are in connection to a 2020 news story about a Van prosecutor who investigated Turkish military personnel who allegedly threw two men from a helicopter.

Çelik, publisher of pro-Kurdish Mezopotamya News Agency, and Yayla, publisher of the pro-Kurdish news website Jiyan Haber, were each sentenced to 15 months in prison. They remain free pending appeal. In April, police raided Çelik’s house in the southeastern city of Diyarbakır as part of a broader crackdown, leading to multiple journalists being jailed pending trial.

Also, the 59th Criminal Court of First Instance in the city of Istanbul sentenced Mumay, an editor with the German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle’s Turkish service, of “illegally obtaining or distributing personal data” in connection to a 2020 tweet about censorship of news stories regarding alleged corruption in Istanbul, according to news reports and court documents reviewed by CPJ.

Mumay was sentenced to 20 months in prison and remains free as the court suspended the execution of his sentence for the next five years unless he commits another offense. 

The chief prosecutor’s office in Istanbul told CPJ via email that they do not reply to emailed requests for comment. CPJ’s emails to the chief prosecutors’ offices in Van and Tatvan and the parliamentary office of Cemal Taşar did not receive replies. CPJ’s call to the legal representation for Battal Taşar did not receive a response.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

On Saturday, April 29, police detained Yılmaz, an editor for the pro-Kurdish Mezopotamya News Agency, and Müftüoğlu, co-chair of the local media advocacy group Dicle Fırat Journalists Association, in the southeastern city of Diyarbakır in connection with an investigation by prosecutors in Ankara, the capital, according to multiple news reports.

Ankara prosecutors alleged that Yılmaz and Müftüoğlu have ties to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a militant group and political party that Turkey classifies as a terrorist group.

Separately, on April 29, police detained six female journalists in Istanbul’s Kadıköy neighborhood for publicly reading a statement protesting the arrests and prosecution of journalists in Ankara and Diyarbakır, according to reports and tweets by advocacy organizations.

On May 1, Istanbul police attacked and briefly detained at least two journalists as they covered Labor Day marches and protests, according to news reports.

Turkish authorities have arrested and charged several members of the Kurdish media over recent months with similar allegations of PKK connections, ahead of the country’s May 14 presidential election.

“The detainment of journalists Sedat Yılmaz and Dicle Müftüoğlu, on top of the arrests in Diyarbakır and the allegations of violence toward these journalists and others who showed solidarity with them in Istanbul, are signs of distress from a government that’s worried about the upcoming elections,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “The authorities must immediately release the journalists in custody and seriously investigate claims of police brutality.”

After the detainment in Diyarbakır, police drove Yılmaz and Müftüoğlu to Ankara. While they were being transported, the journalists alleged that their hands were tied behind their backs for 15 hours, they were deprived of food for 24 hours, insulted by the police officers, and Yılmaz was kicked in the head by one of the officers, resulting in hearing loss, according to multiple news reports. The pair are still detained, and Yılmaz’s lawyer has filed a criminal complaint concerning his client’s injuries and treatment.

The six female journalists were released on April 29 without charge, and later filed legal complaints against the police. They are: 

1. Eylem Nazlıer, a reporter for the leftist daily Evrensel. She reported that police officers slapped her face multiple times and punched her head once as her hands were cuffed behind her back. 
2. Pınar Gayıp, a reporter for the leftist Etkin News Agency (ETHA)
3. Serpil Ünal, a reporter for the leftist news website Mücadele Birliği 
4. Esra Soybir, a reporter for the leftist news website Direnişteyiz
5. Yadigar Aygün, a reporter for the leftist news website Gazete Karınca  
6. Zeynep Kuray, a freelance reporter who covers social events and protests

Gayıp and the other journalists also reported wounds to their wrists from the plastic cuffs that were tightened too tightly, according to those reports. The journalists were taken to a hospital for medical treatment before the police station, as is legally required.

On April 25, authorities in Diyarbakır detained at least nine journalists and a media lawyer for alleged ties to PKK. As of April 29, five have been released: 

• Media lawyer Resul Temur
• Osman Akın, news editor for the pro-Kurdish daily newspaper Yeni Yaşam
• Kadir Bayram, a camera operator for PIYA production company
• Salih Keleş and Mehmet Yalçın, two journalists whose outlets CPJ could not immediately confirm. 

CPJ’s emails to the chief prosecutors’ offices of Ankara and Istanbul didn’t receive a reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

In the early hours of Tuesday, April 25, authorities in 21 cities throughout the southeastern province of Diyarbakır detained more than 100 people accused of having ties to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which Turkey considers a terrorist organization, according to multiple media reports.

At least 10 Kurdish journalists were included in the crackdown, which also targeted politicians, lawyers, artists, and others.

Authorities also detained Resul Temur, a Diyarbakır-based media freedom lawyer who represents more than half of the 40 journalists behind bars in Turkey who were included in CPJ’s December 1, 2022, prison census, according to news reports and the Media and Law Studies Association, a local rights group.

“Turkish authorities are yet again showing that they will use the country’s terrorism laws as a cudgel against the press,” said CPJ Program Director Carlos Martinez de la Serna, in New York. “Authorities should immediately and unconditionally release the journalists recently swept up in a crackdown in Diyarbakır along with lawyer Resul Temur, and drop all efforts to suppress coverage of Kurdish issues.”

Authorities arrested at least three journalists with the pro-Kurdish Mezopotamya News Agency, according to that outlet and other news reports, which identified them as editor Abdurrahman Gök and reporters Ahmet Kanbal and Mehmet Şah Oruç. Authorities are seeking to detain Mezopotamya publisher Ferhat Çelik after he was not found at his home, the news agency said.

Those reports also said that authorities had detained Osman Akın, news editor for the pro-Kurdish daily newspaper Yeni Yaşam; Beritan Canözer, a reporter for the pro-Kurdish all-women news website JINNEWS; Kadri Esen, publisher of the Kurdish-language newspaper Xwebûn; and four journalists whose outlets CPJ could not immediately confirm: Arif Akkaya, Remzi Akkaya, Mikail Barut, and Salih Keleş.

As CPJ has documented, authorities have recently detained Kurdish journalists in Diyarbakır and Ankara, and charged them months later with PKK membership on flimsy evidence.

CPJ emailed the chief prosecutor’s office of Diyarbakır for comment but did not receive any reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

“By issuing prison sentences to Mehmet Güleş and İsmail Çoban, Turkish authorities have yet again abused the country’s anti-terror legislation,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “Authorities should not contest the journalists’ appeals and should cease their practice of retaliatory prosecutions against members of the media covering Kurdish issues.”

On Tuesday, April 18, local media outlets reported that two courts in eastern Turkey separately found Mehmet Güleş and İsmail Çoban guilty of making propaganda for the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which Turkey considers a terrorist organization. Both journalists pleaded not guilty.

The Second Elazığ Court of Serious Crimes sentenced Güleş, a reporter for the pro-Kurdish Mezopotamya News Agency, to 21 months and 25 days in prison, but then delayed the enforcement of that sentence, reports said. During his trial, authorities’ evidence included news stories Güleş shared on social media by his former employer, the shuttered pro-Kurdish Dicle News Agency.

Separately, the Fifth Diyarbakır Court of Serious Crimes sentenced Çoban, the former responsible news editor for the shuttered Kurdish-language outlet Azadiya Welat, to 18 months and 22 days in prison, and did not delay the execution of that sentence, reports said. During his trial, authorities presented news stories by Azadiya Welat about the PKK as evidence. 

Çoban has been imprisoned since 2018 on other terror-related charges related to his work.

Resul Temur, a lawyer who represents both Güleş and Çoban, told CPJ via messaging app that he believed the journalists were being punished for their work, and said they intend to appeal the verdicts. CPJ emailed the chief prosecutor’s offices of Diyarbakır and Elazığ for comment but did not receive any replies.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

In February, authorities indicted 10 Kurdish journalists and accused them of membership in the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK.

On March 16, authorities in the southern city of Mersin detained Bayram, who works in distribution for the pro-Kurdish daily newspaper Yeni Yaşam, as part of the investigation into those journalists, according to multiple news reports and court documents reviewed by CPJ.

On March 21, the First Court of Penal Peace in Ankara, the capital, formally arrested Bayram and also accused him of being a member of the PKK, according to those sources. He is being held in Ankara’s Sincan Prison.

“Turkish authorities should immediately release Yeni Yaşam employee Hamdullah Bayram and all journalists who are being held behind bars on trumped-up terrorism allegations,” said CPJ Program Director Carlos Martinez de la Serna, in New York. “Authorities must stop retaliating against journalists and other media outlet employees over outlets’ coverage.”

Authorities questioned Bayram about times he retweeted his employer on Twitter as well as books, magazines, and other printed material confiscated from houses in Mersin and in the southeastern city of Diyarbakır, according to those court documents, which said that Bayram denied the accusations and did not have a home in Mersin.

Authorities also alleged that Bayram had incriminating material on his cell phone, which he blamed on the fact that he bought the phone second-hand and it still contained data from its previous owner, those documents said. He said he was unfamiliar with people whom authorities accused him of contacting via WhatsApp, and said he did not use that program.

CPJ emailed the Ankara chief prosecutor’s office for comment but did not immediately receive any response.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

A disturbing video in which men in uniforms can be seen dumping blindfolded people into a pit and then shooting them is circulating viral on social media as visuals from Turkey. It is claimed that the civilians are contractors who are under government scrutiny over allegations of creating sub-par structures which likely led to the loss of thousands of lives in the recent earthquakes.

On WhatsApp, this clip is shared with multiple captions. One such text reads, “Turkish soldiers shooting contractors whose shoddy work killed thousands of innocent people. They were paid for Seismic Dampers to absorb earthquakes but they buried car tyres under the foundations of huge High Rise buildings.”

Alt News has received multiple requests on its WhatsApp helpline (+91 7600011160) to verify this clip.

This clip is also circulating on Twitter and Facebook. Below we have provided some stills from the viral clip for visual identification for the readers.

Fact Check

Alt News performed a keyword search on Google and came across an article by News Line Magazine published in April 2022. This article featured an image of a soldier that matches one of the soldiers seen in the viral clip. The report says that the clip is from Syria where military personnel committed a massacre of hundreds of civilians in 2013.

The article provides a details of the investigation into the identity of the soldiers seen in the viral clip. It says that the video is from the neighbourhoods of Tadamon, a suburb in Syria. The two soldiers identified are “Amjad Youssef, 36, who at the time of the massacre held the military rank of warrant officer, and the now-slain Najib al-Halabi, born in 1984, who held no official rank as he was serving in the armed militia known as the National Defense Forces (NDF)”.

A report was also published by The Guardian in April 2022 with the same details. The video was first leaked by a source to an activist in France, and then to the researchers, Annsar Shahhoud and Prof Uğur Ümit Üngör, from the University of Amsterdam’s Holocaust and Genocide Center.

Researcher Annsar took the alias Anna Sh and spoke with Syrian military personnel through Facebook for over two years which led to the findings and a confession from Amjad, the soldier in the fishing hat.

A video report of the same was uploaded by The Guardian on its website.

To sum it up, a video of soldiers killing civilians in Syria in 2013 was falsely shared as visuals from Turkey where the government is executing contractors for faulty constructions that likely led to the loss of thousands of lives in the recent devastating earthquakes.

The post Old video from Syria viral as Turkish builders being executed after quake appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Kalim Ahmed.

On February 16, members of the Presidency of Religious Affairs, a Turkish government body that oversees religious issues, confiscated and damaged equipment from three Greek freelance journalists while they were in the eastern city of Antakya covering the aftermath of an earthquake that struck the area earlier that month, according to a report published March 20 by the Media and Law Studies Association nongovernmental organization, MLSA co-chair Veysel Ok, who spoke with CPJ via messaging app, and one of those journalists.

“Turkish authorities must conduct a swift and through investigation regarding the complaints of Greek journalists Kyriakos Finas, Victoras Antonopoulos, and Konstantinos Zilos who had their equipment confiscated and smashed as they were documenting the recent earthquake in eastern Turkey,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “These journalists should be compensated for their equipment and their lost footage, and authorities should ensure that such incidents are not repeated.”

Journalists Kyriakos Finas, Victoras Antonopoulos, and Konstantinos Zilos were covering a mass funeral after the earthquake when members of the Presidency of Religious Affairs, accompanied by military police, ordered them to stop recording the procession, according to Ok and Finas, who spoke to CPJ by phone.

Finas and Antonopoulos heard that order and stopped filming, but Zilos was further from the scene and continued working. Police then took all three journalists to a building owned by the religious affairs office where they confiscated their cameras and phones, Finas and Ok said.

Authorities returned their equipment the following day, but all of it was smashed and broken. Finas told CPJ that they lost all the footage they took in Turkey, and that the loss of their phones and cameras were a significant financial hardship for each journalist.

After the journalists returned to Greece, the Turkish Embassy in Athens contacted them and promised to give them new equipment, Finas said, adding that they had not received any new gear by Monday, March 21.

Ok, who is also a lawyer representing the journalists, told CPJ that he plans to file suit this week seeking damages over the incident.

CPJ emailed the Turkish Interior Ministry, the Presidency of Religious Affairs, and the Turkish Embassy in Athens for comment but did not receive any replies.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

On the evening of Monday, February 27, police in the eastern province of Osmaniye arrested Ali İmat and İbrahim İmat, two brothers who work as journalists in the area, according to news reports and legal documents shared online by parliamentary deputy Tuncay Özkan.

Authorities accuse the brothers of publicly spreading disinformation about the government’s response to the February 6 earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria, and the journalists remain in custody as of Thursday, according to those sources.

Separately, on Wednesday evening, police in the capital city of Ankara detained Gökhan Özbek, publisher of the independent news website and online broadcasting platform 23 Derece, according to news reports and tweets by the journalist, his lawyer, and his outlet,

Police questioned Özbek about reporting on 23 Derece that quoted earthquake victims and politicians, according to his outlet. On Thursday, he was transferred to a court and then released pending investigation, according to further tweets by the journalist’s outlet and his lawyer.

“Turkish authorities’ attempts to obstruct reporting and intimidate journalists in the aftermath of the terrible earthquakes that hit the country show that even a natural disaster is not enough to stop their harassment of the press,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative, “Authorities should immediately free journalists Ali İmat and İbrahim İmat, drop any investigation into Gökhan Özbek, and ensure that members of the media are not targeted for their work.”

A new disinformation law, passed in October 2022, carries prison terms of up to three years for those convicted of publicly spreading false information that causes concern, fear, or panic.

Ali İmat is the publisher of the local news website Osmaniye’den Haber, and İbrahim İmat published the now-defunct weekly newspaper Ayrıntı before becoming a freelance journalist, according to CPJ’s review of the journalists’ Facebook pages and review of İbrahim İmat’s freelance publications at the national pro-government outlet İhlas News Agency.

The İmat brothers were arrested over posts on their Facebook pages, where they frequently share local reporting, in which they investigated allegations that tents meant for earthquake victims had not been distributed, according to news reports, which said they were being held at the Osmaniye Closed Prison pending trial. CPJ was unable to find contact information for the journalists’ legal representatives.

Authorities have not formally accused Özbek of a crime, according to those tweets about his case.

On February 28, journalist Sinan Aygül was sentenced to 10 months in prison for spreading disinformation, the first conviction that CPJ documented under the new law. Turkey’s largest opposition party, the Republican People’s Party, applied to annul the amendment with the Constitutional Court of Turkey, where it remains pending, according to news reports.

CPJ emailed the chief prosecutors of Ankara and Osmaniye provinces for comment, but did not immediately receive any replies.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

“CPJ, alongside both domestic and international rights groups, warned Turkish authorities that the country’s new disinformation law would hinder freedom of the press. Today we saw that prediction come true as Sinan Aygül became the first journalist tried and convicted under this arbitrary charge,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative, who attended the trial. “Authorities should not fight Aygül’s appeal and must reform this law to ensure journalists can do their jobs without fearing arrest or imprisonment.” 

Authorities arrested Aygül, chief editor of the privately owned website Bitlis News and chair of the Bitlis Journalists Society, in December 2022 after he tweeted allegations about a sexual abuse case involving a government employee, before deleting them and apologizing for being mistaken.

The new disinformation law carries a prison term of up to three years for those convicted of publicly spreading false information that causes concern, fear, or panic. Turkey’s largest opposition party, the Republican People’s Party, applied to annul the amendment with the Constitutional Court of Turkey, where it remains pending, according to news reports.

CPJ’s email to the chief prosecutor of Bitlis province did not immediately receive a response.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

“Critical journalism during a time of mourning for the tens of thousands of lives lost to the earthquakes may appear harsh, but it can also pave the way to justice for the victims and better regulations to save lives in the future,” said CPJ Program Director Carlos Martinez de la Serna, in New York. “Turkish authorities should revoke the penalties leveled against broadcasters FOX TV Turkey, Halk TV, and TELE1, and refrain from silencing media criticism of the government and its institutions.”

On Tuesday, February 22, the Radio and Television Supreme Council, the government telecommunications regulator known as RTÜK fined Halk TV and TELE1 5% of their annual revenue and fined FOX TV Turkey 3%, the reports said. The RTÜK also suspended the next five episodes of the Halk TV and TELE1 shows that aired criticism of the government’s earthquake preparation and rescue efforts.

The outlets have the right to appeal to RTÜK decisions under Turkey’s telecommunications law.

Separately, the RTÜK on October 19, 2022, had imposed a three-day broadcast ban on TELE1 that will begin Wednesday, February 23, in response to a parliamentary deputy’s comments on a political debate show in September 2022. Socialist politician Sera Kadıgil described the Presidency of Religious Affairs, Turkey’s official religious authority, as “a tool for political Islam” while she was a guest on the show. TELE1 will comply with the court order for an immediate ban while its appeal is pending. 

CPJ emailed RTÜK for comment but did not receive any response.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Jennifer Dunham.

After his prison term ended in November 2022, “It was a very nice feeling to be among a crowd after being alone for so long,” Türfent told CPJ’s Turkey Representative Özgür Öğret. “I’ve been hosting so many guests.” The rest of the interview, translated from Turkish and lightly edited for clarity and length, appears below.

Though Türfent’s prosecution was openly retaliatory and all 13 of the state’s initial witnesses recanted their testimony against him, he told CPJ that his case received comparatively limited attention in Turkey because he’s Kurdish. Türfent was born on the Turkey’s southeastern edge bordering Iran and Iraq, a predominantly Kurdish area and a stronghold for armed groups seeking autonomous rule. He began reporting on rights violations in local conflict zones for the now-shuttered Dicle News Agency (DİHA) to help victims whose stories never made it beyond the region. Instead, he became one of those stories.

Turkish authorities stepped up such violations in the past year, with the arrest of dozens of Kurdish journalists on suspicion of terrorism, making it the world’s fourth worst jailer of journalists at the time of CPJ’s December 1, 2022, prison census.

CPJ emailed Turkey’s Justice Ministry and the Interior Ministry for comment but did not receive any responses.  

What led up to your arrest? There were reports that you received threats.

After I [published] a few stories, I was effectively made a target by the people who were violating human rights, as happens to every journalist who reports on similar violations in conflict zones. Without a doubt, one story kicked everything off. [Editor’s note: In 2016, Türfent reported on a violent mass detention of local Kurdish workers by Turkish counter-terror agents.]

[Authorities] from the governor’s office to the [interior] ministry made statements about how an investigation had been opened [into] the police officers involved. Needless to say, that was just a formality.

First, I was followed and verbally assaulted. Then things escalated. I was shot at with plastic bullets and received death threats on social media from [accounts ostensibly associated with Turkish counter-terrorism special forces]. It is not easy to receive death threats directly from the forces tasked with protecting you. [My lawyers] filed criminal complaints, but [the threats were] not even investigated.

Things came to a head when special operations officers detained me. [They] denied it for hours, and it was only confirmed that I was in custody after pressure from the public. I was subjected to intense physical violence. Our complaints about that were ignored, too. This is the far end of Turkey! Nobody would know about it. And what then, even if they do? [The authorities] have a huge culture of impunity backing them up.

How did you feel when the prosecution witnesses withdrew testimonies against you? Did you still expect to be convicted?

I was made to wait [in prison] for 13 months for an indictment, so for more than a year I had no idea what I was being accused of. Then came a farcical trial; a trial in name only. The prosecution witnesses told the court that they were forced to sign their testimonies [against me] by police officers.

I wasn’t shocked exactly, because forced testimonies are in demand around here! [But the prosecutor’s] hands were left empty [when they were withdrawn]. Everybody assumed that I was not going to be sentenced. However, a judge who had voted for me to be released [pending trial] at an earlier hearing was suddenly removed from the court council. At that moment, we understood that these people were acting from political motivations, and that the verdict would not be independent.

Were the witnesses’ claims investigated?

One of the women said officers threatened to rape her if she would not sign the testimony. Another said they removed his teeth with pincers when he refused to sign. The other [accounts] were all similar. The course of the trial would have changed immediately if we were in a normal country – an investigation would be started in a flash. However, [the judges] preferred to play deaf, dumb, and blind.

Why do you think you were targeted?

It was obvious that the free press was being targeted, and [through my treatment] a firm message was being delivered to other journalists on [the authorities’] behalf. [I was] made into an example.

Tell us about your experience in prison.

I was in [five different closed or high security prisons.] I usually spent my days reading and writing. I was arbitrarily kept in solitary confinement for 18 months. Our rights were [constantly being] shelved. Both the state of emergency and the pandemic [provided] strong grounds for that.

There are serious problems with access to medical services in prisons. Sometimes [when] you have a complaint or an illness, your petitions to go to the infirmary can [take] more than a month [to get a response]. Then, my rights to conversation, sports, courses and other social activities, and [my access to] books, newspapers, publications, TV and radio; all were [arbitrarily denied at times].

I was not subjected to physical torture in prison, but being kept isolated for years is torture in itself.

Your trial and conviction did not receive a lot of media attention in Turkey. How would you explain this?

There is a fundamental reason for this harsh punishment to journalism not getting its due in the national agenda, despite all the scandals and legal oddities: national and international press freedom groups display about 10% of the reaction to an arrest in Istanbul for one in Hakkari [in the southeast]. This adds insult to injury. We know journalists whose trials are yet to begin. It was too late for us; let it not be too late for them. It should not be.

Will you continue to practice journalism? What are your plans for the future?

There is no option to not practice journalism. Our profession is our pride; we will not drop the pen because we paid a little penance for it. There is a need for writers and artists to [record the people’s perspective of] the troubles that have been ongoing for over a century in our country. Journalism in Turkey is in its death throes, but I have one life, I humbly intend to keep on writing.

But I intend to give myself some more time and take a breath. I have earned that much, haven’t I?

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Özgür Öğret.

State broadcaster CCTV, state news agency Xinhua and the People's Daily newspaper have all sent reporters embedded with Chinese teams searching for survivors, with live broadcasts from the scene of the disaster.

Meanwhile, democratic Taiwan sent out its own 130-strong urban rescue team and medical workers to aid the relief effort, although they were assigned to different sectors of the vast disaster zone, and so were unlikely to meet in the field.

Dutch-born sinologist Manya Koetse, who tracks Chinese social media platforms on her English-language website, What's on Weibo, said official Chinese media had ramped up its reporting soon after the Turkey-Syria quake on Feb. 6, trying to portray China as a responsible major world power.

The first shipment of relief supplies from mainland China including blankets and tents urgently needed in the quake-hit areas arrived in Istanbul on Feb. 11, with electrocardiogram and ultrasound machines, medical transport vehicles and hospital beds arriving later in the same week, the Global Times newspaper reported.

"After the earthquakes, the Chinese government sent an 82-member rescue team ... and the Hong Kong government also sent a 59-member rescue team to assist in local rescue efforts," Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin told a regular news briefing in Beijing on Feb. 15. They were joined by 441 rescuers from 17 private Chinese emergency response teams."

He said that the teams are continuing to look for survivors despite the fact that the "golden window" for finding anyone alive in rubble has now passed.

Irrelevant bridge

China's consul general in Belfast, Zhang Meifang, tweeted a photo of the Chinese-built Canakkale suspension bridge on Feb. 13, boasting that it had "withstood the earthquake."

The tweet was deleted after people pointed out that the bridge is more than 1,000 kilometers from the epicenter of the quake, and that it was built by a multinational team including Korean, Turkish and Danish companies.

China's Sichuan Road and Bridge Co. only installed the steel box girders in December 2020.

Çağdaş Üngör, an academic who studies Sino-Turkish relations and the Chinese Communist Party's influence operations in Istanbul, said the tweet was "outrageous."

"I feel that this kind of political propaganda is really too much right now," she said. "It goes far beyond the scope of public relations or advertising. What's even more outrageous is that [that bridge] is nowhere near the quake zone."

Turkish news anchor Nevsin Mengu also hit out at Beijing's boasting.

"China is busy with political propaganda," he said of a video clip of the Canakkale bridge also posted by Zhang Meifang. "Authoritarian countries like China and Turkey seem to have similarly bad taste in music," he quipped about the music used as a soundtrack to the video.

Zhang eventually deleted her post some 10 hours after posting, but with no explanation, and not before it had been viewed more than 200,000 times and retweeted by the Chinese Embassy in Paris.

Taiwan sends team

Taiwan's mobilization to assist in rescue efforts was the largest in the history of the island’s international humanitarian aid program, search and rescue team inspector Hsu Yu-wen told Radio Free Asia from southern Turkey. 

"We sent a total of 130 search and rescue personnel in two groups, including doctors, nurses and veterinarians, as well as five search and rescue dogs and 13 tons of rescue equipment," Hsu said. A second group consisted of a special plane to fly 90 search and rescue personnel directly to Turkey.

Hwang Pei-tsun, who led the Taiwanese team, said many of his doctors had been helping amputate the limbs of people found alive in the rubble, with photos of them saving people fed to the media by the country's fire department.

"[In one case], the person's hand and foot had already turned black, so they focused on saving the hand, then amputated the leg up to the knee and brought them out," Hwang said. "[At first] there were no vital signs, but they brought her out and kept doing CPR and shocking them, then followed the ambulance to the hospital."

While that victim was dead on arrival, the rescue teams turned around and went back to find more.

"The ambulance sirens have been going non-stop for 24 hours," Hwang said, against a constant background of emergency sirens.

Both teams were listed on a United Nations web page detailing international teams working in Turkey, in an unusual instance of international recognition for Taiwan, which has been frozen out of participation in international organizations by Beijing's insistent territorial claims, which it calls the "one China" principle.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Hwang Chun-mei and Jane Tang for RFA Mandarin.

On January 10, police raided Kartal’s Istanbul home and took him into custody; on January 13, a local court ordered him to be held in pretrial detention on the suspicion of being a member of a terrorist organization, according to news reports.

Kartal covers human rights, corruption, and labor issues for the leftist news website Karşı Mahalle and hosts a news show for independent outlet Özgün TV, those reports said. In court documents reviewed by CPJ, authorities said the basis for his arrest was Kartal’s resemblance to a man in a 2004 photograph of members of the banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK.

Kartal pleaded not guilty and denied that he was the man in the photograph, the documents said.

“It is simply unacceptable that Turkish authorities arrested journalist Sezgin Kartal for what amounts to his resemblance to a man in a 19-year-old photograph,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “Authorities should release Kartal immediately and cease filing spurious terrorism charges against members of the press.”

Ülkü Şahin, a member of Kartal’s legal team, told CPJ via email that police and prosecutors asked Kartal about the types of stories he wrote as a journalist.

Erselen Aktan, another of Kartal’s lawyers, told CPJ via phone that he believed Kartal would not have been arrested on such flimsy charges if he was not a member of the press. Aktan told CPJ that the investigation into Kartal was opened in 2020, but he was only arrested after he became more active promoting his work on social media.

CPJ emailed the Istanbul chief prosecutor’s office for comment but did not immediately receive any reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

On Wednesday, December 14, authorities in the eastern province of Bitlis arrested Aygül, chief editor of the privately owned local news website Bitlis News and chair of the Bitlis Journalists Society, for allegedly spreading false information online, according to news reports and court documents reviewed by CPJ. He is being held pending trial, according to those sources.

On Tuesday, Aygül had tweeted allegations about a sexual assault case in Bitlis; on Wednesday morning he deleted the tweets and posted an apology saying that he had been mistaken. Aygül frequently posts reporting and news commentary on his Twitter account, where he has about 18,000 followers.

“Journalists may make mistakes like anyone else, but sharing and correcting an unconfirmed report should not result in a journalist facing years in prison,” said CPJ Europe and Central Asia Program Coordinator Gulnoza Said, in New York. “Turkish authorities should release Sinan Aygül immediately and ensure that members of the press do not face criminal prosecution for their work.”

Following his tweets, which alleged that a police officer and a soldier were suspects in the sexual assault, and his apology, which said that he had been misinformed, Bitlis police raided the journalist’s house and took him into custody.

Authorities allege that tweets Aygül posted Tuesday violated an amendment added to the country’s penal code in October, which carry prison terms of one to three years for those convicted of publicly spreading false information that causes concern, fear, or panic, those court documents said.

The journalist pleaded not guilty, according to those documents. Aygül is the first journalist that CPJ has documented as being prosecuted under the new criminal amendment.

CPJ emailed the Bitlis chief public prosecutor’s office for comment, but received no reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

Duman, a former editor for the socialist Turkish weekly Atılım, has denied the charges and the Committee to Protect Journalists, which reviewed the available court records of her trial, believes them to be unsubstantiated. Turkey’s Constitutional Court found that her right to a fair trial had been violated and twice ordered a retrial. Duman, meanwhile, remains at the Bakırköy Women’s Prison in Istanbul and holds out little hope that the retrial – already several hearings in – will bring her freedom.

In November, Beril Eski, a lawyer and journalist, spoke to Duman on behalf of CPJ about her conviction, her life in prison, her hope of returning to journalism – and her reaction to a recent raid where prison officials confiscated coats, blankets, books, her radio, the personal diary she has kept for 20 years, court documents regarding her trial, and even her desk and blank pieces of paper. Duman said she and other prisoners were dragged on the floor during the raid and that she spent four days in isolation afterward.

The interview, translated from Turkish, has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Eski: Tell us about your arrest, interrogation, trial, and conviction process? Were you mistreated or tortured? 

Was it really a court of law or was the verdict already decided? The trial lasted for 10 years. The sentencing was done three months shy of 10 years because the statute of limitations would have come into effect, and we would have been released if 10 years were past [with no conviction]. Then the case went back and forth to the Constitutional Court of Turkey (AYM). 

I was kept awake for four days in [police] custody. The interrogation lasted day and night. I had hallucinations. I was conscious, there was no physical torture, but they did not let me sleep; [they] probably drugged me. I asked for a blood test from the medical staff. My stomach was hurting a lot [and] was making sounds. But the medics insistently refused to do a blood test.

I did not testify during [police] custody. They wanted me to sign a statement they had prepared; I refused. It was the same at the prosecutor’s office, too. I refused the prosecutor, he punched me, attacked me. I still did not sign. We filed criminal complaints to the court but did not get any results. 

What is the status of your retrial?

Three hearings were held since the AYM ordered the second retrial. I wanted to attend the sessions in person, but my request was denied. I attended through teleconference [and] my request to be released was denied anyway. 

My conviction needs to be overturned but it does not get done. I have served 20 years; my family is waiting for me to be released. I offered my defense [to the court] but I’m not sure if it was looked at. They are trying to have me identified by witnesses about events I had nothing to do with. I do not have a hope for being released anymore. I do not get my hopes up because otherwise I couldn’t manage to carry on in prison.

[Editor’s note: The fourth hearing of Duman’s retrial, which included several defendants, was heard by the 12^th Istanbul Court of Serious Crimes on December 9. It lasted two-and-a-half hours and did not address any of the charges against her. Duman who attended by teleconference, told the court that the confiscation of her legal documents during the prison raid had violated her right to prepare for her defense. The court denied her request to be released pending trial and set the date for the next hearing for March 31.]  

You have been convicted on very serious charges of terrorism. Why do you think you were targeted?

I’m a socialist journalist. The only evidence in the case against me is the testimony of my ex-husband. They made him testify by telling him that they would rape me otherwise. He [later] renounced his testimony, told [the court] that I was not involved [in what I was accused of.] The evidence supported what he said, but the court disregarded it. We were given the harshest sentences. Police have told me that I wouldn’t leave the prison [until I was old enough] to walk with a stick if I didn’t sign their prepared testimony. [Under Turkish law, a life sentence without parole is 30 years.]

Describe Atılım to us?

Atılım is a socialist magazine that I was reading since my college years. I started to work as a reporter there after college and then made news editor. We always have been systematically oppressed. I was taken into [police] custody during my first field assignment. Being taken into custody and oppression never stopped. I was in court every week. I continued to write [about politics] for Atılım [from prison] until I stopped because of other work. I’m also facing charges of writing [terrorist] propaganda for two of my latest articles.

How is your health?  

I suffer from hypertension and arrhythmia. They are currently giving me my medicine but there is no regular monitoring [or] follow-up. I have not been given a device to measure my blood pressure. I have had hypertension for 20 years; [authorities] were more concerned [about the prisoners] 10 years ago. My [blood] pressure has increased, especially in the last five years [but] there has been trouble with going to the infirmary. For example, I have trouble with my ear and I experience balance problems. However, I cannot get examined for that. Hospital visits are made in handcuffs and the soldier [who accompanies the prisoner] enters the exam room. You cannot get examined because the soldier is there. It is not just about being naked, there is an ethical understanding about privacy in doctor-patient relations.   

How do you spend an ordinary day in prison? 

I don’t have much of a routine although I want to have one. I have breakfast in the morning. I listen to the news from Açık Radio. I do work; I read books. We exercise during meal breaks, sometimes we play volleyball. Birthday celebrations happen, sometimes I help arrange activities. I wanted to take a calligraphy class, but I wasn’t allowed. We all wanted to take a Zumba [dance] course but they do not allow us any such activities, I don’t know why. The ordinary prisoners [those not convicted on terror-related charges] are allowed to attend concerts and activities. There was an activity organized for the ordinary prisoners on the day of the raid. They were playing music to them while raiding us. 

How are your prison conditions?

We’re a 36-prisoner ward and there have been times that we’ve had 36 people here. We are 12 now. This used to be a jail [as well as a prison], which meant those already convicted were with people still awaiting trial. I was able [then] to connect with different people from the outside. It was good because otherwise I would forget about the outside. But jailed people do not come here anymore, so I don’t have that now.  

What do you want to do when you’re free? Do you want to practice journalism again?

I would want to practice journalism very much. Twenty years in prison is a very long time. I am very angry at the system. But I would want to do journalism. 

I get forgetful about the outside. For example, I missed photography a lot. I asked for my camera many times, they won’t give it. I don’t even have a desk, let alone a camera. I would do things that I have missed the most when I’m out. Unless my family locks me in (laughs).

I would be me when I get out, as I am here. I cannot stand inequity and injustice. I’m studying. I have graduated from [an] international relations [course], now I’m studying Islamic sciences at the open university. However, there is a problem about books and resources. We have a limit of seven books at a time and you wait two months for a new book.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Özgür Öğret/CPJ Istanbul Correspondent.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Melissa Pawson.

Abdullah was killed and Mohammed Jarada, reporter of Sterk TV, was injured during the Turkish airstrikes on November 20, according to an ANHA executive and Jarada, who both spoke to CPJ by phone, and news reports.

ANHA is a news agency affiliated with the Kurdish administration of northeast Syria and broadcasts in six different languages.

“Turkish authorities must immediately conduct a full and transparent investigation on whether Hawar News Agency (ANHA) reporter Essam Abdullah and other journalists were targeted during Turkish airstrikes in the region,” said Sherif Mansour, CPJ Middle East and North Africa program coordinator. “Journalists are civilians and should be protected while doing their jobs.”

The Turkish strikes on Kurdish militant bases in northern Syria and northern Iraq left dozens—including at least 11 civilians—dead a week after a deadly bombing on an Istanbul street. Turkish authorities blamed the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) and the Syrian People’s Protection Units (YPG) for the Istanbul attack; both groups have denied the charge.

According to an ANHA report, Abdullah headed toward a bombed area in the village of Tqil Baqil in the northeastern Syrian city of Derik after the first round of airstrikes. He was killed while reporting there when Turkish aircraft bombed the area again.

Mustafa Allua, head of ANHA, told CPJ by phone that the strikes occurred at 1:10 a.m. on November 20. “Essam told me that he will go to the targeted village to cover because there are civilian casualties. I agreed,” Allua said.  

“I was in contact with Essam until 2 a.m. We called him several times but were useless,” Allua said. “(W)e realized he was killed in the second airstrike.” Allua added that Abdullah’s body had been found with his camera burned.

Sterk TV’s Jarada was wounded in the northern Syrian city of Kobani, the reporter told CPJ by phone. Around 9 a.m. on November 20, the reporter went with two other journalists to cover the bombing of a hospital when another round of bombs hit the hospital. “I was injured in the head,” Jarada said, adding that he was hit by debris and his journalist colleagues took him to another hospital. “I am feeling good now,” Jarada said.

Sterk TV, which is affiliated with the PKK, published video of the airstrike on the hospital and Jarada being taken to another hospital.

In a statement, the Kurdish-led de facto regional government in the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, condemned the killing and injuring of the two journalists, saying it considered the airstrikes “the twelfth violation against journalists in North and East Syria by Turkey.”

CPJ contacted Haval Jwan, co-chair of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria’s information department, for comment via WhatsApp but didn’t get any responses.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

“Under no circumstances can Sweden fulfill Turkey’s demand to deport exiled Turkish journalist Bülent Keneş and continue calling itself a democratic nation governed by the rule of law. Swedish officials should not use exiled journalists as bargaining chips in their dealings with Turkey,” said CPJ Europe and Central Asia Program Coordinator Gulnoza Said. “Sweden must not give in to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s blackmail and set a precedent that would endanger exiled Turkish journalists worldwide.”

Erdoğan met with Kristersson in Ankara, Turkey’s capital, on Tuesday and told him that the deportation of Keneş, whom he called a terrorist, is “very important” to Turkey, reports said. In an interview with U.S. news site Al-Monitor, Keneş, former chief editor of the shuttered English-language Turkish daily newspaper Today’s Zaman, denied Erdoğan’s claims.  

Erdoğan asked the Swedish prime minister to meet Turkey’s security concerns in order for the country to approve Sweden’s membership bid to join NATO, Al-Monitor said. In October, pro-government Turkish media exposed the personal information of Keneş and other exiled Turkish journalists. Keneş was arrested by Turkish authorities in 2015. 

CPJ emailed the Turkish president’s office for comment but did not immediately receive any response.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

The leading pro-government Turkish daily newspaper Sabah revealed the locations of at least three exiled Turkish journalists living abroad in separate stories in September and October that portrayed them as criminals on the run, according to a CPJ review. All three journalists are wanted by Turkish authorities on terrorism-related charges, such as ties to the Fethullah Gülen religious movement, a former ally of Turkey’s leading Justice and Development Party (AKP) that the government now accuses of plotting the 2016 coup attempt.

“The publishing of the physical locations of Turkish journalists in exile by pro-government media is an unethical and irresponsible act that could lead to serious harm,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “Making journalists targets via the use of pro-government media is an unacceptable move that puts lives at great risk, especially given the history of physical attacks on several Turkish journalists living in exile.”

Sabah published a critical story about exiled Turkish journalist Cevheri Güven in late September, which did not feature the street address of his apartment in Germany but mentioned the city and area where the building is located. In the story, Güven was accused of making propaganda videos to criticize the government and it featured photos of the building alongside photos of Güven, taken near his home. Freelance online journalist Güven frequently shares content on Turkey’s political agenda via social media to his 546,000 followers on YouTube and more than 387,000 followers on Twitter. Turkish authorities asked their German counterparts this month to return Güven to Turkey for prosecution.

In another critical story published in early October, Sabah revealed the street address of exiled Turkish journalist Abdullah Bozkurt, who is living in Sweden. The article accused Bozkurt of being the “planner” of the 2016 assassination in Ankara of AndreyKarlov, the Russian ambassador to Turkey, and claimed the journalist is fleeing from Russian intelligence. The story featured details about where Bozkurt lives and shops alongside photos of him taken in the street. Bozkurt said he has never been a suspect in the assassination case, which ended in September 2021. Bozkurt, executive director of Sweden-based news website Nordic Monitor, was physically attacked in Sweden in September 2020.

Last week, Sabah published another critical story that featured the street address of exiled Turkish journalist Bülent Keneş, former chief editor of the shuttered English-language Turkish daily newspaper Today’s Zaman, which featured photos of him in the street and details about where “he frequently shops.” The Sabah story accused Keneş of being a coup plotter and added that he lives a “life of luxury” in Sweden. Keneş denied any involvement in the 2016 coup attempt and living lavishly in Sweden.

These stories also were featured in other prominent pro-government media outlets, such as A Haber and the English-language version of the daily Sabah, according to CPJ’s review.

On July 7, 2021, Erk Acarer, an exiled Turkish journalist who is a columnist for the Turkish leftist daily BirGün, was attacked outside his home in Berlin by three assailants.

CPJ sent an email to Sabah for comment but didn’t receive any reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

The logo for Shanghai Cooperation Organisation – Fair Use

Held in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, from September 15 to 16, the 2022 summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Heads of State Council demonstrated that the SCO was continuing to evolve into a viable international political congregation independent from the West.

Beginning in the early 1800s, international organizations (IOs) began to emerge as modest arbiters of European affairs. But during and after World War II, new IOs established themselves as far more prominent actors on a global scale. The United Nations (UN), the Arab League, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and several other IOs were created to manage the affairs of their member states.

After the Soviet collapse, more IOs were created to manage the independence of new states, globalization, and regional cooperation. The Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), created in 1991, attempted to coordinate military, economic, and political policies between post-Soviet states. The European Union (EU) and the African Union (AU), created in 1993 and 2002, respectively, bound member states more forcefully to common economic and political norms. Other IOs, like the Arctic Council (1996) and Asia Cooperation Dialogue (2002), aimed to foster broader regional cooperation.

Most new international organizations meshed neatly with the Western-led liberal world order. But in 2001, the formation of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) was formally announced, and it established itself as an exclusionary outlier. Originally known as the Shanghai Five when it was created in 1996, it included China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan, with Uzbekistan later joining when it evolved into the SCO in 2001.

The SCO was created partly to help coordinate a new era of peaceful relations between Moscow and Beijing and to manage their coalescing interests in Central Asian states. In addition, combatting the “Three Evils” of extremism, separatism, and terrorism were major priorities for the organization, which included data and intelligence sharing and common military drills among its member states.

Over time, the SCO began to embrace greater political and economic integration. Support for autocratic rule and limiting criticism of human rights violations set it apart from other Western-aligned IOs, with the SCO also overseeing the growth of joint energy projects, the fostering of trade agreements, and the introduction of the SCO Interbank Consortium in 2005 “to organize a mechanism for financing and banking services in investment projects supported by the governments of the SCO member states.”

But the organization’s most pressing vocation was facilitating a multipolar world order. Investing in an independent forum for economic, political, and military affairs outside of Western influence became a key component of Russian and Chinese attempts to reduce Western power in global affairs.

Russia and China have also developed complementary mechanisms to the SCO, which have helped decentralize its mission. Following the blacklisting of several Russian banks from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) in 2014, for example, the Kremlin approved the creation of the System for Transfer of Financial Messages (SPFS) to replicate SWIFT and introduced the National Payment Card System (now known as Mir), while China created the Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS).

These initiatives even proved attractive to states that were more aligned with the Western-led global order. India and Pakistan began SCO accession talks in 2015 and officially joined the organization in 2017. Despite relatively positive relations with the West, India and Pakistan have both faced Western criticism over human rights and democratic backsliding in recent years. India’s introduction of platforms like RuPay in 2012 and Unified Payments Interface, which eroded the traditional dominance of Visa and Mastercard in the country, also complemented SCO’s attempts to reduce Western economic preeminence globally.

At the 2022 summit of the SCO Heads of State Council, Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev reiterated that the SCO was not an anti-U.S. or anti-NATO alliance. But the organization’s original motive to create a multipolar world was echoed in its Samarkand Declaration, the final declaration of this meeting, and continues to conflict with Washington’s attempts to maintain the U.S.-led world order. According to the declaration, the member states “confirm[ed] their commitment to [the] formation of a more representative, democratic, just and multipolar world order.”

This core stratagem continues to appeal to countries around the world. Alongside the leaders of its eight member states, the SCO invited the presidents of Belarus, Mongolia, and Iran as official observers to the recent summit. Having started its accession process in 2021, Iran signed a memorandum of understanding with the SCO to join the institution by April 2023.

The SCO would likely alleviate Iran’s sense of economic isolation stemming from Western sanctions, a sentiment shared by Iranian officialsat the summit and something that was also noted back in 2007. Belarus has also found itself under increasing sanctions in recent years and enhanced its accession procedures to join the SCO in Samarkand.

The presidents of Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and Turkey were also invitedto the SCO summit as special guests, with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announcing that his country would seek full membership to the SCO. In 2012, Erdoğan joked to Russian President Vladimir Putin about abandoning Turkey’s EU aspirations if Russia would allow them into the SCO. Turkey’s renewed attempt comes at a time when its ties with the rest of the Western world are increasingly strained and could instigate other NATO states, and potentially the EU states, to join the SCO as well.

The SCO has also established strong relations with other IOs. Representatives from ASEAN, the UN, the Russian-dominated CIS, the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), and the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) were invited to the 2022 summit. Notably absent were any representatives from the EU or NATO. Meanwhile, in 2005, the U.S. was rejected from gaining observer status, solidifying the SCO’s status as a bulwark against U.S. influence in Eurasia.

Like all major international organizations, the SCO faces systemic obstacles that hinder its effectiveness and long-term viability. At the recent summit in Uzbekistan, China’s Xi Jinping was welcomed to the country by his Uzbek counterpart, Shavkat Mirziyoyev. Putin, however, was greeted by Uzbek Prime Minister Abdulla Aripov, highlighting Russia’s strained relations with many of the former Soviet states and the growing strength of Beijing over Moscow. Unlike in the CSTO and the EAEU, Russia is not the dominant actor in the SCO, and will increasingly have to contend with China’s predominant authority.

Disputes also remain between SCO member states. India and Pakistan, for example, are afflicted with an ongoing struggle over Kashmir. China and India have their own territorial disputes and have engaged in minor violent skirmishes since India joined the SCO. Additionally, deadly clashes between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan erupted during the recent summit, while admitting Armenia and Azerbaijan, both of which are SCO dialogue partners, will only further increase the number of members currently locked in their own territorial disputes.

But the SCO has consistently portrayed itself as a vehicle to supervise these issues. The leaders of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan met for talks during the summit to assuage tensions. And since 2002, the Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure (RATS) has encouraged military coordination between member states, with the Indian and Pakistani militaries conducting RATS drills in 2021. More drills between them are planned for October, and while they are aimed primarily at countering unrest from Afghanistan, they are also part of SCO’s attempts to manage relations of member states.

China and Russia have also agreed to “synergize” the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the EAEU to help mitigate possible tension between them, with both Xi and Putin meeting on the sidelines of the 2022 SCO summit and pledging to respect each other’s core interests.

The SCO member states clearly believe the organization can, and has greater potential to, effectively manage their concerns and regional affairs, and its appeal continues to grow. Besides the additional SCO dialogue partners (Cambodia, Nepal, and Sri Lanka), Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt were granted the status of SCO dialogue partners at the 2022 SCO summit. Myanmar, Bahrain, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and the Maldives were also granted the status of dialogue partners.

Russian and Chinese influence will fall as more members join, which will also dilute consensus within the organization. But it remains a Beijing and Moscow-led initiative to manage world affairs and to demonstrate that the “international community” is not just the West. With almost half of the world’s population and a quarter of the global GDP, the SCO is increasingly becoming a representative of the Global South.

By pooling together other IOs into an umbrella forum, the SCO can further its goal of challenging the wider Western-dominated IO ecosystem and prevent Washington from setting the global agenda. This will require the constructive management of Russian and Chinese ambitions and the increasingly complex needs of more member states.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by John P. Ruehl.

Turkey’s parliament, known as the Grand National Assembly, started discussing the draft bill on Tuesday evening and is set to finish voting this week, according to multiple news reports and tweets from an official account. The bill includes amendments to press and internet laws and the penal code and, if approved, will criminalize the act of “spreading false information,” according to those reports.

“Turkish parliamentarians are about to vote on a dangerous bill that, if approved, will hinder freedom of the press and speech, not only for members of the media but of Turkish society who may have opinions that authorities disagree with. Criminalizing the spreading of so-called false information under such vague terms is plain censorship no matter what you call it,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “While this law is expected to pass, there is still a chance for Turkish parliamentarians to reverse course and prevent this historical step backward for the country’s democracy and protect press and speech freedoms.”

Lawmakers already voted on and passed the first two articles of the 40-article bill, reports said. The first 28 articles of the bill introduce a new category for online journalists who are not currently recognized as members of the media by Turkey’s Press Law; Article 29 updates the penal code. The bill was introduced by the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its ally, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), in May, and was approved by a parliamentary commission by June before being considered by the Grand National Assembly this week.  

The AKP and MHP, which control the necessary majority in the legislature, plan to approve all articles by Friday, the reports said. If passed, the bill will go into effect if President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan signs it within 15 days.

If the penal code change is approved, those found guilty of publicly spreading false information to cause concern, fear, or panic would face sentences of one to three years in prison, and the penalty would increase for offenders who hide their identity or act on behalf of a criminal group, but what constituted misleading information or who would make that determination was not clear, according to CPJ’s review of the bill.

The bill’s authors wrote in the introduction that the change to the penal code is designed to protect Turkish citizens’ rights online while combating “disinformation” and “illegal content” produced by “false names and accounts”; they argued that this action falls in line with regulations in the United States and European countries, such as Germany, France, and the United Kingdom.

The bill also expands restrictions on social media first passed in 2020; that law requires social media platforms with over one million users to open local offices and assign local representatives. Under the bill, a representative of a social media platform will be required to reside in Turkey, which would allow the Turkish authorities to prosecute them if they choose. The proposed amendments also provide more detail of existing obligations of social media companies and make it easier for Turkish authorities to remove content from the internet.

In recent months, local press freedom groups have protested the proposed law, describing it as “the heaviest censorship in the history of the press” that would “suffocate” journalism in Turkey.

CPJ emailed the Turkish president’s office and Grand National Assembly for comment but did not immediately receive a response.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Against this backdrop, a video of some people standing with coffins on their shoulders with a dancing elderly man in front of them is viral on social media. It is being claimed that a father had promised his daughter that he would dance at her wedding, but is now dancing on her grave. The daughter was purportedly killed by the Iranian regime for protesting against the killing of civilians over how they wore their hijabs.

Pakistani journalist Ahmed Quraishi shared the video, claiming that the man seen dancing in front of the coffin in the video was the father of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, whose death in police custody has sparked protests in Iran. (Archived link)

One of the saddest things you’ll see: #MahsaAmini‘s father dancing for his 22 year old daughter at her grave. She insisted he promise to dance on her wedding. He’s keeping his promise.#IranProtests2022 #IranRevolutionpic.twitter.com/ToYw61uzCp

— Ahmed Quraishi (@_AhmedQuraishi) October 1, 2022

Another user tweeted the video with a similar claim. It garnered over 4.5 lakh views as of this writing. (Archived link)

Heartbreaking
Iranian father who promised to live long enough to dance at his daughter’s wedding ends up dancing at her funeral after she was killed by the Iranian morality police for not covering her hair#IranRevolution2022 #مهسا_امینی #koyapic.twitter.com/t8POVJiR4j

— Shukri Hamk (@Sh_q_y) September 28, 2022

Another user named Pallavi amplified the video claiming that it featured the father of a woman who was killed for protesting against the killing of civilians over hijabs. (Archived link)

The video is attracting a lot of traction on social media platforms in several countries. JK Rowling, author of the popular fantasy novel series Harry Potter, also retweeted the clip. 

Fact-check

Alt News performed a keyword search related to the viral video, and found a tweet posted by Iran’s official news channel Press TV. In this tweet, the outlet dismissed the viral claim and added that this video was part of a Turkish drama named Ata Ocaği.

J. K Rowling has retweeted a fake viral video purportedly showing an Iranian father’s dance on the grave of his daughter who was killed in recent riots in Iran. In fact the video is part of a Turkish drama called Ata Ocaği. pic.twitter.com/Pfo4qvm0kh

— Press TV (@PressTV) September 30, 2022

This is a scene from the 78th episode of the Turkish drama Ata Ocaği. This video was uploaded on YouTube by a channel named Xəzər TV on January 9, 2018. Scenes from the viral video appear here between the 19:26 and 20:18 mark. 

To sum it up, several social media users mistakenly shared a video of a Turkish drama with the false claim that the man dancing in front of a coffin was the father of a woman killed in the ongoing protests over the hijab in Iran.

The post Iran Hijab row: Turkish TV drama scene shared as man dancing at daughter’s last rites appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Abhishek Kumar.

On Monday, September 19, Şahin, a freelance journalist who was a former reporter for the pro-Kurdish privately owned daily newspaper Yeni Yaşam, was sentenced to six years and three months in prison for the charge of being a member of a terrorist organization by the Ninth Court of Serious Crimes in the southeastern city of Diyarbakır, according to reports and tweets of Platform for Independent Journalism, known as P24, which monitored the September 19 sentencing hearing. 

The court did not issue an arrest warrant for the journalist who was not present at the hearing but extended her standing foreign travel ban pending appeal of the charge, according to those sources. Şahin’s lawyer, Resul Tamur, told the court that the case against the journalist was based on secret witness testimonies that he called “lies,” and urged Şahin’s acquittal, the reports said.

“Turkish authorities should not fight the appeal of journalist Hatice Şahin,” said Carlos Martínez de la Serna, CPJ’s Program Director, in New York. “Turkey should stop charging journalists with terrorism when they are doing their jobs and start taking measures to improve the country’s press freedom record.”

According to CPJ’s review of the 78-page indictment against the journalist, the first 73 pages focus on the history and gatherings of the Democratic Society Congress, known as the DTK, a nongovernmental group that authorities allege is connected to the banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party, known as PKK. The evidence against the journalist in the indictment relates to her reporting on the group’s meetings, such as taking flights from Istanbul to Diyarbakır on the dates the group had gatherings in 2017; personal notes and agenda; wiretapped phone records of short conversations with individuals on where to meet and when; and secret witness testimonies claiming that Şahin was involved with terrorism. Şahin has pleaded not guilty of the charge, according to the indictment.

Since 2018, several people have been arrested and put on trial for their alleged involvement with the group, according to reports. One of the journalists, Ayşegül Doğan, received the same sentence and charge as Şahin in 2020.

CPJ emailed the Diyarbakır chief prosecutor’s office for comment but did not immediately receive any reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Aygül, chief editor of the privately owned local news website Bitlis News and chair of the Bitlis Journalists Society, a local trade group, was arrested by police in the eastern city of Bitlis on Tuesday, September 13, on an arrest warrant issued for a fine of 1,500 Turkish liras (US$82) that the journalist had refused to pay, according to news reports and his lawyer Burhan Aksoy, who spoke to CPJ on the phone.

The fine was issued in 2015 as a result of Aygül being found guilty for “insulting” Vahit Kiler, a parliamentary deputy of the governing Justice and Development Party in Bitlis, according to those sources. Aygül was accused of insulting Kiler after calling him a “wolf politician” in a column that is no longer available online, those sources said. When used as an adjective, “kurt” (wolf) means “somebody who knows somewhere/something/their business well” or “someone smart; someone who cannot be cheated,” according to a Turkish language institution considered Turkey’s authority for its official language.

“Turkish authorities should immediately release journalist Sinan Aygül and stop interfering with his work by using judicial bureaucracy,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “Aygül, like many of his colleagues in Turkey, is repeatedly being harassed by the judicial system over his reporting. The authorities in Bitlis should allow him and all journalists to work freely.”

CPJ documented a separate case involving the journalist last year, when he was found guilty of “violating the secrecy of an investigation” for reporting about a sexual assault. This 2021 conviction violated the terms of his parole for not paying the fine in the insult case, Aygül told CPJ in a July 2021 phone interview. Aygül also told CPJ that he will not pay the fine on principle.

On June 1, 2021, Aygül went to prison as a formality for the 2021 conviction and was released on the same day under probation, according to news reports.

CPJ emailed the chief prosecutor’s office in Bitlis and Kiler for comment but did not immediately receive a reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

In the statement, the groups urged the agency reinstate the advertising, noting that the ads were a “vital source” of the paper’s income. The groups stated that the Press Ad Agency has “a regulatory duty to act as an independent and fair distributor of public ads, and not to facilitate censorship through suppressing critical news outlets.”

The statement also noted that the Constitutional Court of Turkey decided on August 10 that the agency has been arbitrarily banning advertisements in critical print outlets including Evrensel.

The full statement is available here.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

“We are deeply disappointed by the court’s decision to reject a bid to release 15 journalists and one media worker from pretrial detention in Diyarbakır,” said CPJ Program Director Carlos Martinez de la Serna, in New York. “Authorities in Diyarbakır should drop all charges against the members of the media in this case, and Turkish authorities should stop jailing journalists and ensure the press is not targeted in political prosecutions.”

Authorities in Diyarbakır have detained at least 21 journalists and media workers who work for pro-Kurdish outlets since early June, as CPJ has documented. The pro-Kurdish Mezopotamya News Agency and other sources reported that, on August 16, the Fifth Diyarbakır Court of First Instance rejected an appeal from the journalists’ lawyers for their release, ruling that the arrests were “just” and “lawful.”

CPJ emailed the Diyarbakır chief prosecutor’s office for comment, but did not receive any reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Hilal Seven.

“Turkish authorities must not fight the appeal of photojournalist Abdurrahman Gök, and should stop pursuing trumped-up terrorism cases against members of the press,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “Gök’s coverage of the killing of a civilian by security forces in 2017 has resulted in years of official harassment. Turkey must allow journalists to do their jobs without fear of such retaliation.”

On Thursday, June 30, the Fifth Court of Serious Crimes in Diyarbakır found Gök guilty of making propaganda for the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party and sentenced him to 18 months and 22 days in prison; he is free pending his appeal, according to those news reports and a tweet by the journalist. The court also acquitted Gök on a charge of membership in a banned group, those reports said.

The case stemmed from Gök’s work as an editor of the now shuttered pro-Kurdish Dicle News Agency in 2017, when he photographed police officers shooting and killing a young man, those reports said.

The evidence against Gök consisted of his photographs of the shooting as well as “notes for news stories, phone conversations made with news sources, books in my house, [and] newspaper clippings that I kept for archival reasons,” he said in a March interview. Authorities also investigated his social media posts in a separate case that was merged with his terrorism trial in January, reports said.

Gök’s photographs of the shooting were used as evidence in the trial against the officer involved, and Gök won a local journalism award for them that year. Police raided his home shortly after the photos were published in 2017, took him into custody alongside other journalists for three days in late 2018, and then charged him with terrorist membership and propaganda.

CPJ emailed the Diyarbakır chief prosecutor’s office for comment, but did not receive any reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

“Turkish authorities’ arbitrary detention of at least nine journalists today marks another dark day for the press in the country,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “Authorities should be ashamed of their raids on newsrooms and journalists’ homes. The journalists targeted for detention should be released immediately and without charge.”

Those news reports stated that at least 21 people had been arrested since the early morning of Wednesday, June 8; CPJ was able to confirm that at least nine are presently working as journalists.

Police in Diyarbakır raided the newsroom of the pro-Kurdish website Jin News, confiscated computer hard drives, and also detained Jin News manager Safiye Alagaş and editor Gülşen Koçuk after raiding their homes and confiscating their phones and other equipment, according to those reports, which said authorities did not provide information to the journalists’ lawyers about the operations or the investigation.

Diyarbakır police also detained pro-Kurdish Mezopotamya News Agency editors Aziz Oruç and Mehmet Ali Ertaş, former Mezopotamya editor Ömer Çelik, freelance journalists Lezgin Akdeniz, Kadir Bayram, and Serdar Altan, and Mehmet Şahin, a columnist with the Kurdish-language weekly Xwebûn, those reports said.

CPJ emailed the Diyarbakır chief prosecutor’s office for comment, but did not receive any reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

Müftüoğlu, who is also the co-chair of the Dicle Fırat Journalists Association, a media advocacy group, said prosecutors were investigating her for allegedly financing terrorism after she sent money to two imprisoned former journalists from the shuttered pro-Kurdish Dicle News Agency. She told CPJ she did not know whether she would be charged with a crime.

Müftüoğlu told CPJ that she sent money to Nedim Türfent and Ziya Ataman, journalists who are serving prison terms for alleged membership in terrorist groups.

“The money I send goes to the prison management, who transfers the money to electronic cards which can only be used in the prison cantina,” she told CPJ. “How can this be financing terrorism?”

The journalist said police first raided the wrong apartment searching for her on June 3; when her neighbors told her that authorities were looking for her, she went to a local police station, where she was detained.

Müftüoğlu said she was not questioned until the third day of her detention, when a prosecutor asked her about the money transfers; she said she believed her detention was an effort to discourage journalists from showing solidarity with their imprisoned colleagues.

CPJ emailed the Diyarbakır chief prosecutor’s office for comment, but did not receive any reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

On May 27, lawmakers from Turkey’s governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) and their ally, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), introduced the draft law, which would amend the penal code and press and internet laws, according to multiple news reports.

The bill would add an article to the penal code that would sentence those found guilty of publicly spreading misleading information to between one and three years in prison and would increase the penalty for offenders who hide their identity or act on behalf of a criminal group, according to CPJ’s review of the bill. However, the bill did not define what constituted misleading information or say who would make that determination.

The AKP and MHP control the necessary majority in the legislature to pass the bill; however, as of June 1, a date has not been set for a vote. If passed, the bill will be enacted if President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan signs it within 15 days.

“Turkey has many vague laws already used to prosecute and imprison members of the media. This addition of prosecuting disinformation within the Turkish legal system will only function as a similar tool. Who will decide what is and is not ‘disinformation’? More importantly, how?” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “The Turkish authorities should not adopt the proposed law, should restrain from criminalizing so-called disinformation, and stop seeking more control over the internet.”

The bill also expands restrictions on social media first passed in 2020; that law made it obligatory for social media platforms with over a million users to open local offices and assign local representatives, as CPJ documented.

Under the bill, the representative of these platforms will be required to reside in Turkey, which would allow the Turkish authorities to prosecute them if they so choose. The proposed amendments also bring more detail to the existing obligations of social media companies and make it easier for the Turkish authorities to remove content from the internet.

In a joint statement, local press freedom groups called for the bill’s withdrawal, saying the proposed changes could bring about “one of the heaviest censorship and self-censorship mechanisms” in Turkey’s history.

The bill’s authors wrote in the introduction that it is designed to protect Turkish citizens’ rights online while combating “disinformation” and “illegal content” produced by “false names and accounts” and argued that this action falls in line with regulations in the U.S. and European countries such as Germany, France, and the United Kingdom, according to CPJ’s review.

Of the 40 articles in the bill, 28 of them introduce a new category for journalists working for online outlets in Turkey who are not currently recognized as members of the media by Turkey’s Press Law, according to CPJ’s review. The articles will recognize online outlets as news outlets and allow them to benefit from government advertising funds–which until now have been unavailable to them–and will enable online journalists to obtain a press card, which brings benefits such as early retirement and free or discounted public transportation.

However, CPJ has documented how Erdoğan’s government has used Turkey’s press card system to restrict critical reporting.

CPJ emailed the Turkish president’s office for comment but did not immediately receive a response.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Almire Erkin, 32, a former hospital nurse, is the daughter of Erkin Tursun, a Uyghur police officer in Kashgar (in Chinese, Kashi), who confirmed that she was jailed in 2017.

“A problem was discovered from her phone and she was taken to re-education,” he told RFA.

A Uyghur source who knows the family told RFA that Almire is serving her sentence in a women’s prison in Urumqi (Wulumuqi), capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR).

Although Tursun has close relatives who are top Chinese government officials in local government, he said he was not able to spare his daughter from a prison term for the “crime” of watching Turkish movies.

Almire’s aunt is an official in the Kashgar government, and her uncle, Enwer Tursun, is mayor of Makit (Maigaiti) county in Kashgar prefecture.

Tursun recalled that Enwer told him it was “not a big deal” that Almire had watched Turkish movies and that authorities would release her.

When RFA contacted Tursun at a phone number provided by the anonymous source, he confirmed that his daughter, his oldest child, had been sentenced to 10 years in prison and was serving her term in Urumqi.

Tursun also said that he had received awards from the municipal government for outstanding performance as a police officer in the past 10-12 years, including one for taking in 2,000 people for “re-education.”

Since 2017, Chinese authorities have detained an estimated 1.8 million of mostly Muslim Uyghurs and other native Turkic peoples in a vast network of internment camps for “re-education,” purportedly to prevent religious extremism and radicalism. But evidence quickly emerged that inmates had been deprived of their freedom under the pretense of political education.

The U.S. and the parliaments of several Western governments have declared that the detentions and China’s other rights abuses in Xinjiang constitute genocide and crimes against humanity.

Tursun said his daughter had been sentenced without a trial and that he had heard about her prison term from her husband.

“They came and read the verdict in the neighborhood community,” he said. “They said her sentence was on account of being connected to Turkey.”

Tursun also told RFA that he had urged residents to “protect state secrets” before a United Nations delegation led by U.N. human rights chief Michelle Bachelet arrived in the XUAR last week for a visit to Kashgar and Urumqi.

In the run-up to the visit, the Chinese government launched a campaign warning Uyghurs not to talk about or discuss “state secrets,” meaning the detention of Uyghurs or other measures to repress them.

“We are telling people that when they see the U.N. delegation team, they should speak about how our situation is good and how our lives have turned around for the better,” Tursun said.

Uyghur rights groups condemned Bachelet’s failure to denounce the Chinese government’s repression in the XUAR as genocide during her visit.

On Sunday, Campaign for Uyghurs based in Washington, D.C., called for Bachelet’s immediate resignation, saying her visit was “a Potemkin-style sham” and accusing her of neglecting her mandate to the world to stand up for human rights.

Translated by RFA Uyghur. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Shohret Hoshur for RFA Uyghur.

Almire Erkin, 32, a former hospital nurse, is the daughter of Erkin Tursun, a Uyghur police officer in Kashgar (in Chinese, Kashi), who confirmed that she was jailed in 2017.

“A problem was discovered from her phone and she was taken to re-education,” he told RFA.

A Uyghur source who knows the family told RFA that Almire is serving her sentence in a women’s prison in Urumqi (Wulumuqi), capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR).

Although Tursun has close relatives who are top Chinese government officials in local government, he said he was not able to spare his daughter from a prison term for the “crime” of watching Turkish movies.

Almire’s aunt is an official in the Kashgar government, and her uncle, Enwer Tursun, is mayor of Makit (Maigaiti) county in Kashgar prefecture.

Tursun recalled that Enwer told him it was “not a big deal” that Almire had watched Turkish movies and that authorities would release her.

When RFA contacted Tursun at a phone number provided by the anonymous source, he confirmed that his daughter, his oldest child, had been sentenced to 10 years in prison and was serving her term in Urumqi.

Tursun also said that he had received awards from the municipal government for outstanding performance as a police officer in the past 10-12 years, including one for taking in 2,000 people for “re-education.”

Since 2017, Chinese authorities have detained an estimated 1.8 million of mostly Muslim Uyghurs and other native Turkic peoples in a vast network of internment camps for “re-education,” purportedly to prevent religious extremism and radicalism. But evidence quickly emerged that inmates had been deprived of their freedom under the pretense of political education.

The U.S. and the parliaments of several Western governments have declared that the detentions and China’s other rights abuses in Xinjiang constitute genocide and crimes against humanity.

Tursun said his daughter had been sentenced without a trial and that he had heard about her prison term from her husband.

“They came and read the verdict in the neighborhood community,” he said. “They said her sentence was on account of being connected to Turkey.”

Tursun also told RFA that he had urged residents to “protect state secrets” before a United Nations delegation led by U.N. human rights chief Michelle Bachelet arrived in the XUAR last week for a visit to Kashgar and Urumqi.

In the run-up to the visit, the Chinese government launched a campaign warning Uyghurs not to talk about or discuss “state secrets,” meaning the detention of Uyghurs or other measures to repress them.

“We are telling people that when they see the U.N. delegation team, they should speak about how our situation is good and how our lives have turned around for the better,” Tursun said.

Uyghur rights groups condemned Bachelet’s failure to denounce the Chinese government’s repression in the XUAR as genocide during her visit.

On Sunday, Campaign for Uyghurs based in Washington, D.C., called for Bachelet’s immediate resignation, saying her visit was “a Potemkin-style sham” and accusing her of neglecting her mandate to the world to stand up for human rights.

Translated by RFA Uyghur. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Shohret Hoshur for RFA Uyghur.

An Istanbul court on Monday sentenced Turkish civil rights activist and philanthropist Osman Kavala to aggravated life in prison, setting off a wave of strong global condemnation.

"This egregious sentence is a death knell for Turkey's democracy."

"We have witnessed a travesty of justice of spectacular proportions," said Nils Muižnieks, Amnesty International's Europe director.

"This verdict deals a devastating blow not only to Osman Kavala, his co-defendants, and their families," he added, "but to everyone who believes in justice and human rights activism in Turkey and beyond."

Sixty-four-year-old Kavala, who had already spent four years in prison without a conviction, was sentenced along with seven other defendants for allegedly trying to overthrow the government during an uprising that broke out in 2013.

According to CNN:

He was first arrested in 2017 on charges related to the 2013 Gezi Park protests in Istanbul. The trial was closely watched by rights groups, who have accused the Turkish government of using the judicial system to crack down on dissenting voices.

Though Kavala was acquitted in 2020, that verdict was overturned and new charges were brought against him for his alleged involvement in the July 2016 attempted coup, which resulted in the death of at least 250 people and a subsequent crackdown that has seen over 110,000 people, including civil servants, teachers, activists, and journalists detained.

The court's decision, said Muižnieks, "defies all logic."

"The prosecuting authorities have repeatedly failed to provide any evidence that substantiates the baseless charges of attempting to overthrow the government. This unjust verdict shows that the Gezi trial was only an attempt to silence independent voices," he added.

Liesl Gerntholtz, director of the PEN/Barbey Freedom to Write Center, said Monday marked "a dark moment for Turkey" and called Kavala's life sentence "a devastating and unjust blow, not only to him and his family, but to freedom of expression and human rights in Turkey."

"Kavala's case," she added, "is a blatant attempt to criminalize free expression and use the courts to retaliate against those who dare to criticize the government. This egregious sentence is a death knell for Turkey's democracy."

Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth similarly denounced the sentencing as "an abomination" and said that Kavala "did nothing other than have an independent voice, but [Turkish] President Erdogan seems to need to blame someone for the widespread opposition to his autocratic rule."

Adding to the outrage is Ankara's disregard for the European Court of Human Rights' call for Kavala's release—a flouting that in February prompted the Council of Europe to take nearly unprecedented disciplinary action against Turkey.

The E.U.'s top diplomat, Josep Borrell Fontelles, put the harsh sentences in the context of the European court's demands and said, "Respecting fundamental rights and freedoms is today more important than ever."

European nations including France also bemoaned the outcome. The French foreign ministry called for Kavala's "immediate release" and for all charges against him to be dropped. The ministry added that Kavala's four years in detention already ran afoul of "Turkey's international obligations."

The U.S. State Department also weighed in, with spokesperson Ned Price calling Kavala's "unjust conviction" one that is "inconsistent with respect for human rights, fundamental freedoms, and the rule of law."

"We again call on Turkey to release Osman Kavala, in keeping with European Court of Human Rights rulings, as well as to free all others arbitrarily incarcerated," said Price.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Andrea Germanos.

On the night of Monday, April 18, police in Istanbul arrested Haskoloğlu, a freelance journalist, for allegedly “illegally obtaining and spreading personal information,” according to multiple news reports. Authorities placed Haskoloğlu in pretrial detention on Tuesday, according to those reports, which said a court date had not been set for his case.

The journalist was detained in response to a complaint filed by the Turkish Interior Ministry over a Twitter thread he published on April 12 in which he claimed to be in touch with hackers who had allegedly accessed government documents connected to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Intelligence Chief Hakan Fidan, and other Turkish citizens.

“Turkish authorities should be more concerned with the alleged hacking of government databases than the journalists who are covering it,” said CPJ Program Director Carlos Martinez de la Serna, in New York. “Members of the press cannot do their jobs properly in an environment in which they can face detention over journalistic posts on social media. Authorities should immediately release İbrahim Haskoloğlu and stop harassing journalists.”

Haskoloğlu is a freelance journalist who covers local and international politics and sports on Twitter, where he has about 540,000 followers, Instagram, with about 100,000 followers, and YouTube, with 79,000 followers.

In his Twitter thread, Haskoloğlu posted photos purporting to be hacked copies of Erdoğan and Fidan’s government identity cards with their personal information redacted, saying that the hackers provided them to prove that they had accessed government databases containing ID cards, college diplomas, financial information, and other data.

He wrote that the hackers had contacted him two months ago and that he had notified authorities at the time. Those news reports said that authorities accused Haskoloğlu of failing to also notify the prosecutor’s office.

When CPJ called Haskoloğlu’s lawyer Emrah Karatay, he confirmed his client was arrested in response to that Twitter thread, and noted that journalist had not actually shared Erdoğan or Fidan’s personal information as those parts of the images were redacted.

CPJ emailed the Interior Ministry of Turkey for comment but did not immediately receive any reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

On Saturday, April 9, a group of about 50 people raided the office and studio of the privately owned TV broadcaster Deniz Postası in the central city of Kayseri, and attacked Deniz, a host at the station, according to news reports and Deniz, who spoke to CPJ in a phone interview.

The attackers locked the door to the outlet’s newsroom, trapping journalists inside, and proceeded to the station’s studio where they punched and beat local businessman and politician Sedat Kılınç, Deniz’s guest on his show, according to those sources. Deniz said he tried to intervene and protect his guest, and the people then punched him in his face and on his head. He added that neither he nor Kılınç were seriously hurt in the scuffle.

The Kayseri police released a statement on Saturday saying that six suspects were in custody related to the incident.

“Turkish authorities must conduct a thorough investigation into the recent attack on the Deniz Postası broadcaster and hold all the perpetrators and any masterminds to account,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “Turkey must improve its track record for fighting violence against journalists. Authorities must show that the perpetrators who raided Deniz Postası and beat journalist Azim Deniz will face consequences.”

Deniz told CPJ that prosecutors had released the six suspects on April 10, and authorities had not given him any updates on the case. CPJ emailed the Kayseri chief prosecutor’s office for comment but did not immediately receive any reply.

In Deniz’s daily talk show “Ramazan Sohbetleri” (Ramadan Talks), episodes of which CPJ reviewed, he frequently hosts businesspeople and politicians to discuss daily news. He said that the attackers seemed to have targeted Kılınç, and the journalist said he was only attacked after he intervened to protect his guest.

Kılınç, a businessman and politician serving as an alderman on the Kayseri city council, recently resigned from the Nationalist Movement Party, according to reports.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

On March 26, members of parliament with Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) proposed a number of amendments to the country’s real estate, finance, and tax laws; one of those amendments would impose prison terms of up to three years for the publication of “false news” that intentionally harms a private company’s income or reputation, according to reports.

Those convicted could face one to three years in prison along with fines to be set by a judge, according to those reports. As of Thursday, members of parliament were continuing to debate the amendments, according to the legislature’s website.

“Turkish authorities should ensure that steps taken to make the country more attractive for foreign investment do not come at the expense of journalists’ freedom to report on economic issues,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “The proposed amendment barring ‘false news’ about private companies is an obvious attempt to scare journalists and restrict reporting on corruption and malpractice, and it should not become law.”

The AKP and its allied National Movement Party control the necessary majority in the legislature to pass the amendments; if passed by the parliament, they will be enacted if President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan signs them into law within 15 days.

On March 16, Turkey’s finance minister promised to “take down” bureaucratic hurdles that have restricted foreign investment in the country, in an effort to improve the country’s economic performance, according to news reports.

CPJ emailed the Turkish president’s office and AKP member of parliament Abdullah Güler, the first lawmaker to sign on to the amendments, for comment but did not receive any replies.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

When then Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan paid a historic visit to the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) in April 2012, he was warmly welcomed. Turkey shares linguistic and cultural ties with Uyghurs, more than 50,000 of whom have emigrated or escaped to the Middle Eastern country from Xinjiang.

Erdoğan’s first official visit to China in his new position began in Urumqi (in Chinese, Wulumuqi), the region’s capital, and drew international attention. When he visited the Grand Bazaar in the city’s Dongkowruk (Erdaoqiao) area, one of Xinjiang’s top landmarks, many Uyghurs surrounded him to congratulate him and speak to him.

Meryem Emet (in Chinese, Aimati), a Uyghur married to a Turkish citizen who spoke fluent Turkish, was among those at the Grand Bazaar who spoke with Erdoğan at the time.

Afterwards, she was targeted by Chinese security forces for her hour-long conversation and later imprisoned, said Abdüllatif Kuçar, her husband who lives in Istanbul with their two children.

“The mother of my children was sentenced for 20 years and is currently in a Chinese jail,” he told RFA last week. “Although she was born and raised in Urumqi, she was summoned to Kuchar, and they jailed her there.”

Emet was arrested in 2017 amid a wider crackdown by Chinese government authorities on predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities in Xinjiang. She was taken to an internment camp in Kuchar (Kuche) county in southern Xinjiang’s Aksu (Akesu) prefecture.

Emet’s detention drew the attention of the U.N. human rights office (OHCHR) and international human rights organizations.

Even though Emet, an only child, had not been born in Kuchar, her ancestors were from there, as was her husband.

“When Erdoğan went to Urumqi, my wife met him, and afterwards, they [Chinese authorities] took her away many times for interrogations,” said Abdüllatif Kuçar, who is now hospitalized with late-stage cancer.

When authorities questioned Emet about her conversation with Erdoğan, she told them that she said “hosgeldiniz,” or “welcome” in Turkish. Erdoğan asked Emet how she knew Turkish and invited her to a meeting room where the politician, his wife and daughter talked to her for an hour, Kuçar said.

When Nur Bekri, the now imprisoned former chairman of the XUAR between 2008 and 2014, entered the room for a meeting with Erdoğan, he told Emet to get out, Kuçar recalled. But Erdoğan told Nur Bekri, “Don’t interfere. She is our bride.”

Later, when Emet’s mother became seriously ill and died, authorities confiscated Emet’s passport, Kuçar said.

“They have destroyed our family since then,” he said.

“They have all sorts of excuses to make in order to imprison people who have committed no crime,” Kuçar said about the Chinese authorities.

Xinjiang government authorities were on high alert at the time of Erdoğan’s 2012 visit and became uneasy when accompanying Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, attended Friday prayers at the Noghay Mosque in Urumqi, exciting many local Uyghurs.

At the time, Turkish media reported that Erdoğan’s visit to Xinjiang as the first stop in his China tour was important because he wanted to attract Turkish investors to the region to revitalize trade relations and support the economic development of the Uyghurs.

A final visit

Authorities forced Kuçar to leave the country before Emet was arrested, and he went to Turkey.

After Emet was taken away, her three-year-old and five-year-old children were taken to state boarding schools in Urumqi, where they stayed for nearly 20 months.

When the Chinese government allowed Kuçar to travel to Urumqi in December 2019 to collect the children to take them to Turkey, he found them malnourished and traumatized, one of his relatives said.

Before returning to Turkey, Kuçar and the children went to Kuchar to visit Emet, meeting her for the first time in two years. But Emet acted like a “statue” and did not respond to the family, making her husband concerned about her wellbeing, said the relative, who declined to be identified for safety reasons.

The family member also said that the Chinese government sentenced Emet to 20 years for “marrying a foreigner” and meeting and for speaking with Erdoğan.

Kuçar told RFA that his children are well in Turkey, and that after receiving therapy and attending local schools, they had regained the Uyghur and Muslim identities they lost while living in the Chinese government-run orphanages.

Rights activists in Turkey familiar with the case said many Uyghurs who are now Turkish citizens have been unable to get their family members out of Xinjiang.

Hamidhan Gokturk, founder of the Uyghur News and Research Center in Turkey and former secretary of the East Turkistan Foundation, said the Turkish government has a responsibility to its citizens to help relocate their family members still in Xinjiang, regardless of the state of Sino-Turkish relations.

“Turkey like other countries such as France has to bring back its own citizens trapped in China,” he told RFA.

Family separations are part of the Chinese government’s efforts to eradicate Uyghur culture and language, along with systematic abuse, including arbitrary detentions on trumped-up offenses, against members of the predominantly Muslim minority group, according to human rights experts.

The U.S. and the legislatures of some Western countries have declared that the abuse of Uyghurs constitutes genocide and crimes against humanity, but China’s government rejects the accusations.

Translated by RFA’s Uyghur Service. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Jilil Kashgary.

On Saturday, March 19, in Stockholm, unidentified people hit Dönmez’s car from behind and, when he got out of his vehicle, proceeded to beat him up, according to news reports and tweets by the journalist.

Dönmez was driving his six-year-old daughter home from school at the time of the attack, according to those reports, which said he sustained head trauma and was hospitalized in stable condition.

Dönmez publishes reporting on Turkish politics and alleged corruption, as well as political commentary, on his personal website, Twitter, and YouTube pages; he has about 147,000 followers on Twitter and about 55,000 on YouTube.

“Swedish authorities must swiftly and thoroughly investigate the recent attack on exiled Turkish journalist Ahmet Dönmez, determine if it was related to his reporting, and bring all those involved to account,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “Swedish authorities must provide security for Dönmez and ensure that he can live and work without fearing for his or his family’s safety.”

Dönmez worked as a reporter for the Turkish daily Zaman until 2015, when he fled to Sweden “because of political pressure” according to his website. Turkish authorities shuttered Zaman in 2016, and have accused its staff of having ties to the Fethullah Gülen religious movement, which authorities have labeled a terrorist organization, as CPJ has documented.

CPJ emailed the Swedish police for comment but did not immediately receive any reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

Two images have gone viral with the claim that students from Pakistan and Turkey carried the Indian national flag to escape Ukraine.

The students in the image below have been identified as Pakistanis.

Similarly, another image has been used to claim Turkish students used the Indian flag to escape.

Fact-check

A simple reverse image search reveals that both the photos show students from India.

Image 1

This image is dated February 26 and was found in PTI archives and is captioned, “More batches of Indian students enter Hungary from Ukrainian side at Zahony crossing, travelling onward to Budapest for return to India by AI flight.”

The picture was also used in a report by India Today on the evacuation of Indian students in Sumy.

The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting had also uploaded a video of the students.

Image 2

This image was found on a video report by India Today titled, ‘First batch of Indian students leave for Ukraine border‘. The report is from Februray 25.

Images of Indian students were shared to falsely claim they are students from Pakistan and Turkey who carried the Indian flag to safely escape from Ukraine. It is noteworthy that some Indian students reportedly said that Pakistani and Turkish students indeed used the Indian flag to escape. Alt News has not verified the claim.

The post No, these aren’t Pak and Turkish students who used Indian flag to escape Ukraine appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Nilofar Absar.

On Friday, March 4, the 13th Istanbul Court of Serious Crimes convicted four former Taraf employees on national security charges, according to news reports.

Chief editor Ahmet Altan and editors Yasemin Çongar and Yıldıray Oğur were each convicted of illegally acquiring state secrets and were sentenced to three years and four months each in prison, those reports said, adding that they can remain free while their appeals are pending.

Baransu, a reporter and columnist, was sentenced 13 years in prison: six years for acquiring secret information and seven for “exposing secret information,” those reports said. Baransu has been held at Silivri Prison in Istanbul since 2015 as part of this case, according to CPJ research. 

The court also ordered each defendant to pay 10,250 Turkish lira (US$715), to be divided among five former military officials who were complainants in trial, those news reports said.

“Turkish authorities’ recent convictions of four journalists from the shuttered newspaper Taraf show that the government will stop at nothing to punish adversarial members of the press – even for stories they did not write,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “Authorities should drop this weak case immediately, not contest the journalists’ appeals, and release Mehmet Baransu from custody.”

The charges stem from 2010 reporting by Taraf on documents that were leaked to Baransu, and which allegedly included information on a plan for the military overthrow of the ruling Justice and Development Party, news reports said.

The journalists’ lawyers said that, while the defendants had reported on a set of leaks known as the “Sledgehammer” documents, they had not reported on the specific documents cited in this state secrets case, and they had never acquired those documents, those reports said.

Lawyer Figen Albuga Çalıkuşu said the Turkish military had concluded that the documents in question had been destroyed in 2008, so could not have been part of those 2010 leaks, according to those reports.

Authorities previously arrested Altan in 2016 in an unrelated case, released him briefly in 2019, and then returned him to custody until April 2021, CPJ has documented.

CPJ emailed the Istanbul chief prosecutor’s office for comment but received no immediate reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

“We call on Turkish authorities to launch a swift and transparent investigation into the circumstances surrounding journalist Güngör Arslan’s killing and to determine whether journalism was a possible motive for the shooting,” said CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator Gulnoza Said in New York. “The fact that police apprehended the suspect and found a weapon is promising. Now they must ensure that everyone involved in the killing, including any potential masterminds, are brought to justice.” 

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.