 reported on Thursday.){kind=link}
A Turkish court sentenced six journalists to prison on terrorism-related charges due to their alleged links to the Gülen movement in a retrial following a Supreme Court of Appeals ruling that overturned their previous convictions, the Media and Law Studies Association (MLSA) reported on Thursday.
The İstanbul 25th High Criminal Court convicted Yakup Çetin of “membership in a terrorist organization” and sentenced him to more than six years in prison. The court also sentenced Ahmet Memiş, Cemal Azmi Kalyoncu, Gökçe Fırat Çulhaoğlu, Ünal Tanık and Yetkin Yıldız to two years and a month each for “aiding a terrorist organization.” The court acquitted Ali Akkuş of the same charge, citing a lack of evidence.
The retrial was held after the Supreme Court of Appeals ruled in early 2020 that the initial convictions lacked sufficient evidence to establish the journalists’ affiliation with the Gülen movement, which is accused by the Turkish government of masterminding a failed coup in July 2016, a claim strongly denied by the movement.
During the hearing, the journalists defended their work and denied any ties to the movement. Çulhaoğlu argued that he had been a vocal critic of the Gülen movement since the early 2000s and was targeted for his nationalist stance. Akkuş, who spent three years in pretrial detention and lost his father during that period, emphasized that official reports found no financial ties between him and the movement. Memiş said witness testimony favorable to him was misrepresented in the prosecutor’s indictment.
The journalists, who had worked for media outlets linked to the movement, were initially arrested after the coup attempt, and their tweets and news articles were used as evidence against them. The case originally included 25 defendants, among them former singer-turned-journalist Atilla Taş, who took his case to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR).The court unanimously ruled in January 2021 that there had been a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights’ Article 5 § 1 on the right to liberty and security as well as a violation of Article 10, which concerns freedom of expression, in Taş’s case.
Taş had been kept in pretrial detention for 14 months following the coup attempt due to tweets and articles written by him.
Turkey is one of the world’s biggest jailers of professional journalists and was ranked 158th among 180 countries in terms of press freedom in 2024, according to Reporters Without Borders (RSF).