Sixteen Turkish journalists were imprisoned on Thursday on charges of “belonging to a terrorist organization” in Diyarbakır, a Kurdish-majority southeast Turkey, according to their prison decision seen by Agence France-Presse.
Twenty journalists working for media and production companies close to the (pro-Kurdish) Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) were arrested on June 8 on charges of “belonging to the press office” of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which Ankara and its Western allies consider a “terrorist” . They have since been placed in a pre-trial detention center, and 16 of them were jailed on Thursday, including Serdar Altan, co-chair of the Association of Journalists, on charges of “belonging to a terrorist organization,” according to a decision to be held in jail and one of journalists’ lawyers in response to questions from AFP.
The rest of the journalists were released under court supervision. According to local media, the prosecutor questioned the journalists about the content of their articles. “This leads to the belief that there is an electoral maneuver to block the Kurdish political class and deprive it of its means of expression,” Erol Onderoglu, a spokesman for Reporters Without Borders in Turkey, told AFP. On the other hand, he stressed that these arrests come at a time when Turkey says it is preparing an attack on Kurdish militants in northern Syria.
NGOs regularly denounce the decline in press freedom in Turkey, which ranks 149th out of 180 in the 2022 Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accuses the HDP, the third largest bloc in the Turkish parliament, of being a “political front” for the PKK. Hundreds of HDP members have been arrested since 2016, including leader Selahattin Demirtas, who was imprisoned despite European protests.
