Turkey Crackdown Chronicle: Week of May 15
Veteran columnist pleads ‘not guilty’ to charges of insulting Erdoğan Veteran journalist Hasan Cemal, a columnist for the news website T24 and a founder of the news website P24, today pleaded not guilty to charges of insulting Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan at Istanbul’s 12th Criminal Court of First Instance, T24 reported.
Turkey Crackdown Chronicle: Week of May 8
Police detain two men on suspicion of plotting attack on newspaper Police detained two men suspected of planning to attack the printing house of leading pro-government daily Sabah today, the newspaper reported. According to Sabah, suspects Hasan K and Bahri T were on a motorcycle with no license plates, wearing two sets of clothes, one…
CPJ writes to Turkish foreign minister about barring of foreign journalists
CPJ writes to Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu regarding the barring of four international journalists in a week, asking him to clarify Turkey’s policy on the foreign press, and asking him to affirm that the international press is welcome in Turkey.
Turkey responds to CPJ letter on Zaman takeover, denying move is politically motivated
When riot police stormed the Istanbul offices of Turkey’s largest newspaper, the daily Zaman, on March 4 following a court-ordered takeover, the Committee to Protect Journalists sent a public letter to Turkey’s Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, expressing dismay at the government’s actions and calling on him to uphold press freedom in Turkey.
The Struggle for Candid Interviews
Inside a four-room apartment in Antakya, Turkey, a town on the border with Syria, more than a dozen men sat on mattresses on the floor. It was just past 10 p.m. and the soldiers, all men in the Free Syrian Army, the rebel opposition group in Syria, were busy coordinating their next trip into the…
Turkey Crackdown Chronicle: Week of April 24
Erdoğan says response to “sleaze” of EU’s press-freedom criticism beneath his dignity “Providing an answer to this worthlessness and sleaze would not be very appropriate for the president of Turkey,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan told reporters in Croatia yesterday, responding to EU Parliament President Martin Shulz’s criticisms of Turkey’s crackdown on the press, the…
Turkey Crackdown Chronicle: Week of April 17
Trial resumes for journalists facing multiple life sentences The trial of Can Dündar and Erdem Gül, editor and Ankara bureau chief, respectively, of Cumhuriyet newspaper resumed behind closed doors in Istanbul today. The court today denied prosecutors’ request to combine the case with another case targeting alleged supporters of exiled preacher Fethullah Gülen, whom the…
‘Erdoğan is killing journalism,’ says Today’s Zaman editor forced out after takeover
Since the Turkish daily Zaman and its English-language sister publication Today’s Zaman were taken over by court-appointed trustees last month, over accusations of terrorist propaganda, the papers’ journalists have witnessed riot police fill their newsrooms, the arrests of colleagues, and the loss, through resignations and dismissals, of fellow journalists.