There has been a significant decrease in the number of cases brought under Turkey’s infamous Article 301, a recent news investigation has shown. But the law continues to be rigorously implemented. The original version of Article 301 made it illegal to insult “Turkey, the Turkish ethnicity, or Turkish government institutions”. This was changed in 2008 when the phrase “Turkish ethnicity” was replaced by “the Turkish nation”. The amendment also set conditions for court cases, making the permission of the Justice Ministry mandatory for complaints to be turned into court cases. According to a report published in newspaper Taraf last week, a total of 3,019 requests were sent to the Justice Ministry between 2008 and January 2013. Although the number remains [...]

Fifteen years after she was detained for allegedly perpetrating a terrorist attack in Istanbul’s Spice Bazaar, and eleven years after she was acquitted of those charges, the Turkish sociologist Pınar Selek again found herself on the wrong side of the law when Turkey’s High Court sentenced her to aggravated life imprisonment last week. The Court issued an arrest warrant, which was sent to Interpol, since Selek is living in Strasbourg, where she is pursuing her doctoral studies. Selek’s court case had been controversial from the beginning. The attack with which she was originally charged, which killed seven people and injured 127, came at a time when the conflict between Turkey and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party was at its peak. For [...]

Judging by sales figures, Turkish readers love comics magazines and graphic novels, but the political and military leaders of the country have had little patience for them, an examination of Turkey’s banned books revealed last month. On 5 January 2013,  the Turkish government will lift bans against 453 books and 645 periodicals blacklisted over a 63 year period. It is part of a package of judicial reforms that will also offer a conditional pardon for certain media and freedom of expression offences and secure greater free expression in the publishing field. When Turkish journalists got hold of the astonishing list of banned books at the end of November, a surprise awaited them. Amid titles of works by “usual suspects” — Karl Marx, [...]

In Turkey, television drama is big business. A handful of big-budget productions attract millions of viewers every week, both at home and abroad. According to Abdullah Çelik, the head of property rights department in the culture ministry, more than 65 million dollars were received from foreign television companies in acquisitions of TV dramas, with more than ten thousand hours of screen time exported overseas. Such costly, and bankable, television productions thrived over the last decade, partly thanks to the entrepreneurial spirit that came with the governing AK Party’s policies of economic liberalisation. But according to Turkish prime minister and leader of the AK Party, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the industry’s success story has a sinister undercurrent that needs looking into. Erdoğan [...]