Reporters without borders (press release), France
Oct 12 2007

Arat Dink convicted of `insult to turkish identity’ after publishing
article about his father Hrant Dink

Reporters Without Borders today voiced `outrage’ at a one-year prison
sentence against the son of murdered journalist Hrant Dink, Arat
Dink, editor-in-chief of the weekly Agos, and his editor Serkis
Seropyan, using the same law under which his father had been
prosecuted.

A court in the Sisli district of Istanbul found Arat Dink and Serkis
Seropyan guilty of `insulting Turkish identity’ for publishing an
interview in Agos which Hrant Dink gave to Reuters in 2006 in which
he termed as genocide the massacres of Armenians from 1915-17,
remarks for which Hrant Dink was prosecuted at the time.

The one-year jail sentence was suspended against both men because
neither had any previous convictions

`It is a complete aberration for this decision to come now, after
Turkish President Abdullah Gull said on 3 October that he was in
favour of an amendment to Article 301 which makes it a crime to refer
to the Armenian genocide’, the worldwide press freedom organisation
said.

`Ironically, the same court yesterday handed down a two-year
suspended prison sentence against a youth who threatened the
editorial staff of Agos, after Hrant Dinks’s murder,’ the
organisation said.

Ridvan Dogan, 19, admitted sending threats to Agos but claimed that
he had forwarded the threats without reading the contents of the
email. The court suspended his sentence because he had expressed
regret and because he had committed no previous offences.

Several Agos journalists had to be given police protection because of
the threats received just a few days after the 19 January 2007 murder
of Hrant Dink outside the newspaper’s offices by 17-year-old Ogun
Samast.

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