Thousands of Turkish citizens have been detained or arrested for criticising Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan under the pretext of 'insulting the president' as a member of Communist Party of Turkey was arrested recently for sharing a social media post

Thousands of Turkish citizens face criminal punishments on the pretext of “insulting” President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as many people have been detained or arrested in recent years around the country.

Most recently, Saime Yıldız, member of the Communist Party of Turkey (TKP), was arrested for allegedly insulting the president via social media posts.

It is striking that the scale of people facing punishment due to libel suits is so wide that thousands of people from different social sections and political views have been detained or arrested because the Turkish judiciary dependent on the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) seeks for nothing but evidence regarding social media messages criticising the president and the government.

THOUSANDS OF CITIZENS FACE CRIMINAL FILES FOR ‘INSULTING’ ERDOĞAN

In recent years, Turkish prosecution offices filed 4,936 criminal cases for “insulting” the presidential office, or rather Erdoğan himself. As 1,080 files resulted in verdicts of conviction, 679 files were concluded with the decision of acquittal as the deferment of the announcement of the verdict was witnessed in 867 files.

In other words, 46,193 cases were filed in total including many citizens from students to lawyers and lawmakers to literary critics. Furthermore, many people were detained for criticising President Erdoğan during public transportation journeys as they were informed by pro-government informers for legal procedures.

Zuhal Olcay, a well known Turkish singer and actress, was imprisoned to 10 months for singing a song with lyrics, “Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, everything is a lie, everything is futile, you’d say one day it was a dream once the life ended”. By the same token, Abdüllatif Şener, an exterior minister and one of the founders of the AKP party, was included in the same category of criminal punishment.

However, there are so many farcical examples showing how the mechanism of “insulting” Erdoğan works. A physician was dismissed since he shared an image of Erdoğan as he depicted the president as the Lord of the Rings character Gollum via a Facebook account. A 13-year-old kid was sentenced to 1 year and 9 months in jail for insulting Erdoğan since he shared a critical Facebook post.

Furthermore, a woman was detained due to “insulting” Erdoğan after a pro-government citizen informed her, alleging that she insulted the president during a bus journey. What is more, a judge was assigned to another city since he applied to the Constitutional Court for the annulment of the criminal punishment for “insulting the president”.

Including 3 members of the Communist Party, 10 citizens were handed a jail sentence for shouting slogans, “Murderer, thief Erdoğan!” at an outdoor meeting as they protested the Islamic State’s bomb attack that killed over a hundred citizens in 2015, which became the deadliest terror attack in the modern Turkish history.

Among many other striking examples, Kemal Okuyan, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Turkey, was sentenced to 11 months, 20 days in jail on the grounds that he had “insulted” Erdoğan with his article: “Did the country surrender to a maniac?”

LAWYER DEMİR: ‘THIS LAW ARTICLE MUST BE ABOLISHED’

soL News talked with lawyer Özge Demir about the increasing cases of “insulting”. Demir noted that only 4 cases had been filed during the presidency of Ahmet Necdet Sezer, the tenth president of Turkey between 2000-2007, while the number reached up to 4,157 as of 2016, let alone over a thousand of cases in the last year.

Demir stated that criticising a president cannot be defined as a crime because it just stands for a political criticism considering that President Erdoğan is not only the head of the state but also the chair of a political party. As Demir said, however, Turkish prosecutors do not act independently but biasedly in an attempt to “protect” the politically biased Erdoğan.

Demir noted that the crime of “insulting the president” is used as a guise of repressing the people through the abuse of laws and the ongoing state of emergency. Furthermore, even the Constitutional Court cannot reach a decision to settle the problem for the annulment of the related law article. As thousands of cases of “insulting” continue, Demir called on the people to struggle to eliminate the basis of the implementation of presidential “insulting” lawsuits.