A father and daughter in Turkey have denounced each other to the authorities for insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the BirGün daily reported on Monday.
The father, identified only by the initials M.C., submitted a petition to a prosecutor’s office claiming to feel offended by his daughter A.T.C.’s pejorative remarks about him and Erdoğan in e-mail correspondence between the two.
As a result, an investigation was launched into the daughter, who appeared before a prosecutor for questioning in which she revealed that she has been at odds with her father, who dislikes Erdoğan.
In return, the daughter herself submitted a petition to the prosecutor’s office in which she reported her father for having made many insulting comments about Erdoğan among family members as well as in his political conversations with friends on Facebook.
The incident added an interesting example to the tens of thousands insult cases since Erdoğan was elected president in 2014.
“This shows us that the epidemic of whistleblowing has reached family relations,” the lawyer for the daughter told BirGün. “The crime of insulting the president is being used here as a means of retribution among family members.”
Professor Yaman Akdeniz, a faculty member of the law school at İstanbul Bilgi University, said 66,691 insult investigations have been launched since Erdoğan’s election in 2014, resulting in 12,305 trials thus far.
Yavuz Çobanoğlu from Munzur University’s sociology department claimed that such cases have been more frequent since a failed coup attempt in 2016.
“This denunciation has become the solution to all problems. When people take aim at, are feuding with or want to take revenge on someone, they can easily accuse them of insulting the president. No other complaint draws so much attention from authorities no matter their content,” Çobanoğlu said.