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NEWSDESK
In Turkey the Right to Free Speech is Being Lost
- Details
- Written by Eman Jueid
- Category: In Other News
This article, written by Mehdi Hasan, appeared on The Guardian on June 10,2012
Which country in the world currently imprisons more journalists than any other? The People's Republic of China? Nope. Iran? Wrong again. The rather depressing answer is the Republic of Turkey, where nearly 100 journalists are behind bars, according to the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe. Yes, that's right: modern, secular, western-oriented Turkey, with its democratically elected government, has locked away more members of the press than China and Iran combined.
But this isn't just about the press – students, academics, artists and opposition MPs have all recently been targeted for daring to speak out against the government of prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his mildly Islamist Justice and Development Party, or AKP.
There is a new climate of fear in Istanbul. When I visited the city last week to host a discussion show for al-Jazeera English, I found journalists speaking in hushed tones about the clampdown on free speech. Within 24 hours of our arrival, one of my al-Jazeera colleagues was detained by police officers, who went through his bag and rifled through one of my scripts. They loudly objected to a line referring to the country's "increasingly authoritarian government". Who says that Turks don't do irony?
READ MORE AT The Guardian
*Photo Credit: OpenDemocracy
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