Article 301 (Turkish Penal Code) - High-profile Cases

High-profile Cases

Article 301 has been used to bring charges against writer Orhan Pamuk for stating, in an interview with Swiss magazine Das Magazin, a weekly supplement to a number of Swiss daily newspapers, including the Tages-Anzeiger, that "Thirty thousand Kurds have been killed here, and a million Armenians. And almost nobody dares to mention that. So I do." The charges, which were brought against Pamuk upon a complaint filed by Kemal Kerinçsiz, were later dropped after the Justice Ministry refused to issue a ruling as to whether the charges should stand.

In February 2006 the trial opened against five journalists charged with insulting the judicial institutions of the State under Article 301, and also of aiming to prejudice a court case under Article 288 of the Turkish Penal Code. Each of the five had criticized a court order to shut down a conference in Istanbul about the Ottoman Armenian casualties in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. (The conference was nevertheless eventually held after having been transferred from a state university to a private university.) The charges carried a potential penalty of a prison term of up to 10 years. The court dropped the charges against four of them on April 11, 2006 when it was determined that the time allowed by the statute of limitation had been exceeded, while Murat Belge, the fifth, was acquitted on June 8, 2006.

Another high-profile case to result from this legislation involved the writer and journalist Perihan Mağden, who was prosecuted for penning an article originally published in the December 26, 2005 issue of Yeni Aktuel, titled "Conscientious Objection is a Human Right". The Turkish military filed a complaint against her in response. In the trial, which took place on July 27, 2006, she was acquitted when the court ruled that her opinions were covered by the freedom of expression and were not a crime under the Turkish Penal Code. If convicted she could have faced three years' imprisonment.

In July 2006 the Istanbul public prosecutor's office prepared an indictment alleging that the statements in the book Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman constituted a breach of the article. The publisher and editors of the Turkish translation, as well as the translator, were brought to trial accordingly, but acquitted in December 2006.

In 2006 Elif Şafak also faced charges of "insulting Turkishness" because of her latest novel, The Bastard of Istanbul. The case was thrown out by the judge after a demand by the prosecutor for the case to be dropped.

In 2006, the well-known Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink was prosecuted under the Article 301 for insulting Turkishness, and received a six month suspended sentence. He was subsequently assassinated by radical nationalists. Orhan Pamuk declared, "In a sense, we are all responsible for his death. However, at the very forefront of this responsibility are those who still defend article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code. Those who campaigned against him, those who portrayed this sibling of ours as an enemy of Turkey, those who painted him as a target, they are the most responsible in this." Hrant Dink was posthumously acquitted of the charges on June 14, 2007, in a retrial ordered by the Court of Appeals.

Publisher Ragıp Zarakolu is on trial under Article 301 as well as for “insulting the legacy of Atatürk” under Law 5816.

In 2007, Arat Dink (Hrant Dink's son) and Serkis Seropyan were convicted to one-year suspended sentences under Article 301 for printing Dink's claims that the killings of Armenians in 1915 was a genocide. (See Armenian Genocide.)

In 2008, Rahîm Er, a daily columnist of conservative democrat Turkiye daily newspaper was convicted under Article 301 for criticising the Court of Cassation of Turkey. Er was criticising the Court of Cassation due to the length of the trials, its heavy backlog, and the hidden resistance to the establishment of regional courts of appeals in Turkey. He was charged with insulting an institution of the Republic of Turkey by chief public prosecutor's office in Bakırköy. This prosecution was stroke out by the dismissal of Mehmet Ali Şahin, then the minister of justice.