TWO important Turkish journalists, known for their influence also abroad, towards release from prison. It was not Erdogan who ordered it, but the Ankara Court of Cassation. So the tug-of-war over freedom for intellectuals continues in Turkey. But the decision of the Supreme Court which ordered the release of two famous names is considered a strong signal: the writer and former editor of newspapers Ahmet Altan, and the columnist and former deputy Nazli Ilicak.
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The Court ruled the release of Altan, detained for four and a half years, considering him not guilty of involvement in the failed coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of 15 July 2016. The Supreme Court thus annulled the man’s sentence of over ten years in prison for “assisting a terrorist organization”.
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Two evenings before the coup, during a television broadcast he would have launched some “subliminal signals”, this is the accusation, such as to favor the insurrection which then returned within four feverish hours of the night.
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A few days ago in Strasbourg, the European Court of Human Rights intervened defining the imprisonment of Altan on terrorism charges as “unreasonable”. Indeed, the European structure had established that the journalist’s rights to security, due process and freedom of expression had been violated by the Turkish authorities.
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In November 2019, Altan, released for the first time, had spent eight days at liberty making statements, interviews and writing articles, only to be sent back to prison on charges that had little convinced the most rigorous international jurists.
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A man in one piece, Ahmet Altan, who a few days ago turned 71 and founded the liberal daily “Taraf”, very critical especially with the Turkish military, spent four and a half years in his cell after being arrested a few weeks after the failed coup. His case, also due to the strength of his essays and his novels, have aroused many international condemnations. And several human rights organizations have repeatedly called for his release. In his articles, Altan has also often been critical of Erdogan and his religiously inspired conservative government.
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With a separate sentence, the Supreme Court subsequently also annulled the conviction for terrorism issued against the columnist Nazli Ilicak, who was also sentenced to life imprisonment in 2018 together with Altan on charges of having tried to “overthrow the constitutional order” ‘ . Both had been accused by the judiciary of being close to the Hizmet movement, that is the Service, a religious organization founded by Imam Fethullah Gulen, considered by Ankara to be the leader of a terrorist group responsible for the coup which vanished in a few hours.
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