Turkish activists launch civil disobedience campaign against law
curbing free speech
AP Worldstream
Feb 23, 2007
A group of activists invited prosecutors to press charges against them
on Friday in a protest against a law that restricts free speech and
has been used to prosecute intellectuals.
Five members of the small Powerful Turkey Party stood in front of a
prosecutor at a courthouse and repeated statements by Nobel
Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk, slain journalist Hrant Dink and
other intellectuals that were used as evidence to prosecute them under
Article 301 of Turkey’s penal code, which bans insults to Turkish
identity.
The group, including party leader Tuna Beklevic, then asked the
prosecutor to file charges against them. Prosecutors would have to
investigate Beklevic and his friends before opening any lawsuit, and
none of the activists were arrested.
More members of the party, which has just a few thousand adherents in
a country of 70 million, plan to conduct a similar act of civil
disobedience next week.
Article 301 makes denigrating Turkish identity a crime punishable by
up to three years in prison.
Pamuk and Dink had both spoken out about the mass killings of
Armenians by Turks in the early 20th century, an issue that remains
sensitive today. Numerous other writers, journalists and academics
have also been prosecuted.
Dink, an ethnic Armenian newspaper editor, was shot outside his
Istanbul office on Jan. 19 and his murder revived a debate about the
law. His prosecution under Article 301 turned him into a reviled
figure among radical nationalists, some of whom were arrested in his
killing.