Cumhuriyet Newspaper journalist Musa Kart – one of the seven jailed newspaper staff released pending the end of their terrorism trial. Istanbul, Turkey, July 28, 2017. Depo Photos/PA Images. All rights reserved.The cartoonists, the lawyer, the board member, the Editor-in-Chief and many of his columnists. Indeed, no one was spared on October 31, 2016 as the police launched a sweeping crackdown on Cumhuriyet, arguably Turkey’s most important independent public interest newspaper. By November 5th, a dozen of its key personnel were being held in pre-trial detention in Sillivri maximum security prison under Turkey’s anti-terrorism law. While the possibility of reprisals against Cumhuriyet always remained a possibility given Turkey’s growing reputation as “the world’s biggest prison for media personnel”, I was alarmed at how quickly the state of emergency imposed by the government after the failed coup of July 2016 turned into a state of terror. Indeed, during the second hearing of the Cumhuriyet trial on September 11th, I bore witness to the full force of state power, with an intimidating phalanx of some hundred armed security personnel stationed menacingly outside the courtroom in Silivri.
While Cumhuriyet’s lawyers began the daunting task of defending their clients against the bewildering charge that they had carried out the activities of armed terrorist organizations of which they formed no part I reflected with no small measure of despondency on what we could possibly do to support them, as a European Foundation with offices in Stockholm and Geneva. Indeed, the Right Livelihood Award Foundation had announced Cumhuriyet as one of its 2016 Laureates just a month earlier, recognizing the newspaper for “for their fearless investigative journalism and commitment to freedom of expression in the face of oppression, censorship, imprisonment and death threats.”
Despite the prevailing mood within civil society circles in Europe that Turkey was a lost cause when it came to advocating for human rights, I nevertheless decided to raise the case of the detained journalists with a couple of UN Special Procedures – independent experts mandated to advise the UN Human Rights Council. It was fortuitous that one of them, David Kaye, special rapporteur on the freedom of opinion and expression, happened to be travelling to Turkey on an official visit in November, and I stressed to his office the importance of visiting the jailed journalists. In the event, the government permitted him to visit five of them, and Mr. Kaye bravely called for their immediate release at his end of mission press conference in Ankara, and again, on the floor of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva in June 2017.
