EU: COMMISSION PLANS TO PUSH TURKEY ON ISSUE OF FREE SPEECH
by David Cronin

IPS – Inter Press Service
September 18, 2008 Thursday

The slow pace of Turkey’s freedom of expression reforms is holding
up its effort to join the European Union, according to an official
assessment set to be published in November.

The European Commission’s upcoming annual report on Turkey will outline
its views on reforms undertaken by the Ankara authorities with a view
to fulfilling the country’s decades-old ambition of EU membership.

For most of this year, the Turkish political establishment has been
fixated on a legal challenge against the ruling Justice and Development
party over allegations that the Islamist background of its leadership
threatened the country’s constitutionally enshrined secularism.

Although the case was dismissed by Turkey’s highest court in July,
Jean-Christophe Filori, head of the European Commission’s Turkey
department, said it had "taken up energies on all sides" and
"distracted attention from the need to pursue reforms."

Addressing a Brussels debate on Turkey, Filori was nonetheless sanguine
about some steps that have been taken. It is positive, he contended,
that Article 301 of the country’s penal code — under which writers
and academics have been prosecuted over claims that they insulted
Turkishness — has been amended. And he argued that there appears to
have been a "sustained decrease" in incidences of torture of detainees,
even if the number of complaints of ill-treatment has risen.

Human Rights Watch is less impressed, however. "In general, there
has been a stagnation in the implementation of human rights reforms
in the past few years," said the group’s researcher on Turkey, Emma
Sinclair-Webb. "This year has been another one of stagnation."

She was particularly critical of efforts to alter Article 301. Whereas
reforms approved by the Turkish assembly earlier this year amounted
to a "tweaking in the wording" of this article, she insisted that it
would be preferable to delete the clause entirely.

Article 301 has been invoked against intellectuals who have exhorted
the present-day Turkish authorities to acknowledge that the slaughter
of 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman Turks in 1915 was tantamount to
genocide. Among those who have faced charges as a result of it were
the Nobel winning novelist Orhan Pamuk and Hrant Dink, editor of a
bilingual Turkish-Armenian newspaper who was murdered by extremists
last year.

Under reforms, the offense of insulting Turkishness has been replaced
with the offense of insulting the Turkish nation. The approval of
the minister of justice is also now required for prosecutions to
proceed. Earlier this month, the current minister Mehmet Ali Sahin
decide to allow a case be taken against the writer Temel Demirer over
a speech he delivered the day after Dink’s murder.

Demirer’s lawyer Siar Isvanoglu said the prosecution illustrated how
promises by the authorities "regarding the European Union, democracy,
structural reform and human rights are all fairy tales."

During a visit to Ankara this week, the head of the Liberal grouping in
the European Parliament Graham Watson said: "The revision to Article
301 earlier this year was a positive step but its text continues to
prescribe prison sentences to those who insult the state and its
organs of government. That is troubling to other European nations
and is incompatible with liberal democracy. Mature democratic states
should have the self-confidence to absorb criticism from within. The
Turkish state is legitimate — it should be able to withstand peaceful
expressions of opinion from its own citizens."

But the country’s foreign minister Ali Babacan cited the changes to
Article 301 as an example of the reforms that Turkey is taking in
order to bring its legislation into line with that applying in the
EU. After talks in Brussels Sept. 17, Babacan promised that further
steps will be taken to meet the requirements of EU membership.

The European Commission is also likely to express concern
about the persecution of homosexuals in its forthcoming report
on Turkey. According to Filori, the banning of the gay rights
association Lamba Istanbul by a local court in May "does give us
cause for concern."

Lamba spokeswoman Sedef Cakmak said her organization is appealing
against the ban and if necessary will take the case to the European
Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

While homosexuality is not illegal in Turkey, the country offers no
legal protection to gays, lesbians and transgender people. "This means
you can be fired from a job just because you are lesbian or taken
into custody without any reason just because you are transgender,"
Cakmak said.

Cakmak said her organization had documented many incidents of
homosexuals being arrested arbitrarily or beaten by the police. While
a greater social tolerance toward gays and lesbians has emerged,
there have also been several killings of homosexuals in recent years.

"If you can hide your identity, you will have no problem," Cakmak
added. "If you cannot or if you refuse to hide your identity, that is
where the problems start. If you are not a very feminine gay or not a
very masculine lesbian, you can have an easy life. As you can imagine,
that is not the case with transgender people. They can’t hide their
identity, and that’s why they are suffering most."