Turkey’s Supreme Court of Appeals has overturned the conviction of Vedat Demir, a professor of communications and former columnist who was sentenced to more than six years in prison in 2020 over alleged links to the faith-based Gülen movement, the Stockholm Center for Freedom reported, citing the Velev news website.
Demir was detained in July 2016, a couple of days after an attempted coup on July 15, and stayed in pretrial detention for seven months until he was released pending trial.
He was accused of being a follower of the Gülen movement, inspired by Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen, based on five one-dollar bills, personal notes, tweets and conversations.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been targeting followers of the Gülen movement since the corruption investigations of December 2013, which implicated then-prime minister Erdoğan, his family members and his inner circle.
Dismissing the investigations as a Gülenist coup and conspiracy against his government, Erdoğan designated the movement as a terrorist organization and began to target its members. He intensified the crackdown on the movement after the abortive putsch in 2016, which he accused Gülen of masterminding. Gülen and the movement strongly deny involvement in the coup attempt or any terrorist activity.
The Turkish government claims that followers of the Gülen movement used one dollar bills to send coded messages. Consequently, possession of one-dollar bills has been accepted as evidence by the courts, including in the case of NASA scientist Serkan Gölge, who was imprisoned for nearly three years on bogus terrorism charges.
In 2018 a pop singer known as Mabel Matiz testified to prosecutors about using one dollar bills in a video clip shot in 2017.
Demir was summarily dismissed from his job at İstanbul University with an emergency decree during a purge of state institutions following the coup attempt.
Following the abortive putsch, the Turkish government declared a state of emergency and carried out a massive purge of state institutions under the pretext of an anti-coup fight. Over 130,000 public servants, including hundreds of academics, were summarily removed from their jobs for alleged membership in or relationships with “terrorist organizations” by emergency decree-laws subject to neither judicial nor parliamentary scrutiny.
Yarına Bakış, the daily that Demir was writing for, was among 164 media outlets that were shut down by the Turkish government during the state of emergency.
The court in its decision stated that criticizing the closure of media outlets and working for a newspaper shut down by a decree do not constitute a crime.
Demir was among the 314 people for whom the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) ruled in June that the pretrial detention following the failed coup against President Erdoğan in July 2016 lacked grounds that could constitute reasonable suspicion.