Reporter Charged with 'Press Crimes' Insists Turkey Has Free Press

Just Journalism's The Wire reports:

Today in ‘Who’s calling Turkey a police state?‘, published on The Guardian’s Comment is free website, Cengiz Çandar abhors the accusation, which he attributes to ‘pro-Israel neocons’, that the recent arrests by the Turkish regime of four journalists ‘were designed to silence independent and critical journalism’. He claims that the false insinuation has been recapitulated in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Financial Times, and the Economist.

‘Here is what they are missing,’ he insists; ‘the journalists who’ve been arrested were not arrested because of their journalistic activities or for expressing their opinions: they are suspected of being part of a plot to topple the civilian government.’

Crucially, he exclaims:

‘As anyone who regularly follows the Turkish media can attest, there is no shortage of sharp criticism of the Erdogan government in the Turkish media. Freedom of expression is part of the daily routine.’

Just last year, however, the same journalist was facing a jail sentence for his reporting in the Turkish media of the murder of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink.

Turkey’s English daily, Hürriyet, reported in July 2010 how Çandar’s journalism resulted in him facing a prison sentence and having to defend himself in court for criticising how the case was being handled by the courts:

‘In a February column published in daily Referans and the Daily News, journalist Cengiz Çandar had expressed some of the same concerns as Bağdat. “No justice comes, or can come, out of that [court] room. The Hrant Dink case proceeds with such frivolity that it is impossible to expect justice from such recklessness,” Çandar wrote in his column titled “Hrant and ‘justice’ being ridiculed,” in which he criticized the court for, among other things, “forgetting to bring in the most critical witness.”

‘The column has Çandar facing a prison sentence of between one and three years on charges of “insulting a public officer,” daily Hürriyet reported Monday. In his testimony to the prosecutor in charge of press crimes, who summoned him to testify in the spring, Çandar said his column did not include any insult and that he held no personal hostility toward the court. He added that even the judge allegedly insulted by his column had agreed with the conclusion that the courtroom lacked decorum and felt no need to proceed with the charges. Undeterred, the prosecutor filed the case on behalf of the judge. A court in Istanbul’s Bakırköy district accepted the indictment, but postponed Çandar’s initial hearing to a new trial date of Dec. 13.’