An intensive, nearly year-long effort by the Committee to Protect Journalists to gain the release of imprisoned CPJ International Press Freedom Award winner Ocak Isik Yurtçu, a prominent Turkish editor, and other imprisoned Turkish journalists resulted in an amnesty law, passed by Turkey’s parliament, that freed six newspaper editors, including Yurtçu.
An intensive, nearly year-long effort by the Committee to Protect Journalists to gain the release of imprisoned CPJ International Press Freedom Award winner Ocak Isik Yurtçu, a prominent Turkish editor, and other imprisoned Turkish journalists resulted in an amnesty law, passed by Turkey’s parliament, that freed six newspaper editors, including Yurtçu.
An intensive, nearly year-long effort by the Committee to Protect Journalists to gain the release of imprisoned CPJ International Press Freedom Award winner Ocak Isik Yurtçu, a prominent Turkish editor, and other imprisoned Turkish journalists resulted in an amnesty law, passed by Turkey’s parliament, that freed six newspaper editors, including Yurtçu.
An intensive, nearly year-long effort by the Committee to Protect Journalists to gain the release of imprisoned CPJ International Press Freedom Award winner Ocak Isik Yurtçu, a prominent Turkish editor, and other imprisoned Turkish journalists resulted in an amnesty law, passed by Turkey’s parliament, that freed six newspaper editors, including Yurtçu.
Ocak Isik Yurtçu had little to celebrate last July 24, Journalists Day in Turkey. “Nobody in the world has been sentenced to so many years in prison for articles others have written,” he said from his jail cell in an interview with the daily Yeni Yuzyil. Yurtçu, former editor in chief of the now-defunct daily…
The Committee to Protect Journalists sent an emergency mission to Turkey in July 1997 to press for the release of imprisoned Turkish journalists. CPJ Vice Chairman Terry Anderson led the delegation to support Turkish journalists’ growing condemnation of press freedom violations in their country.