2018

Journalist sentenced to over 7 years in jail A court in the eastern Muş city on October 10 sentenced Seda Taşkın, a reporter for the pro-Kurdish Mezopotamya News Agency (MA), to a total of seven years and six months in prison, her employer reported. Taşkın attended the hearing via teleconference from the Sincan Women’s Prison,…

Erdoğan in Germany A Turkish man wearing a “freedom for journalists” T-shirt was thrown out of a press conference between President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin on September 28, video from Euronews and Özgürüz showed. The man was identified as Adil Yiğit, chief editor for the Turkish language news website…

Journalists jailed Police on September 24 briefly detained and questioned Ergün Demir, chief editor of Akatos Haber, a local news website in northwestern Kocaeli province, the leftist daily Birgün reported.

Court finds journalists guilty of making propaganda for terrorists A court on September 19 found the directors of the shuttered socialist television channel Hayatın Sesi TV guilty of making propaganda for terrorist organisations, the daily Evrensel reported.

Turkey detains Austrian writer Austrian citizen Max Zirngast, a contributor to several magazines and a student of political science, according to the OSCE, was detained by anti-terrorism police in Ankara, Turkey’s capital, on September 11, Deutsche Welle reported. Deutsche Welle quoted a tweet of German magazine re:volt–one of his employers–as saying that Zirngast was taken…

Journalists in court The prosecutor in the trial of imprisoned journalist Nazlı Ilıcak, who is charged with “revealing information regarding state security that is supposed to be secret for espionage proposes,” asked the 26th Istanbul Court of Serious Crimes for a life sentence, the daily Evrensel reported on September 6. Ilıcak attended the hearing via…

Police assault reporters in Istanbul Turkish police violently attacked several reporters trying to cover a weekly silent protest, known as the Saturday Mothers, in Istanbul’s Galatasaray Square on August 25, the New York Times reported. The reporters, alongside activists participating in the protest, were attacked by the police during the 700th vigil for those who…

An Istanbul court on August 20 lifted the foreign travel ban on Meşale Tolu, a translator and editor for the leftist Etkin News Agency (ETHA), the daily Cumhuriyet reported.

Capital Markets Board issues warning on coverage of financial markets The Turkish Capital Markets Board (SPK) said in a statement that Article 107 of the Law no. 6362 on “market fraud” will be used against those who “spread fabricated, false and fallacious news about the economy,” independent news website Bianet reported on August 13. The…

On June 19, Abdülhamit Bilici, the last editor-in-chief of the now-shuttered Turkish paper Zaman, tweeted about the decline of press freedom in his home country. If you can see his tweet, you are probably not in Turkey because it is among the over 1.5 million tweets belonging to journalists and media outlets censored there under…