The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) today sentenced Turkey to the temporary detention of journalist Nazli Ilicak, saying her arrest following the failed 2016 coup attempt “had no valid reason”.
A well-known Turkish journalist, Ilitsak, now 77, was arrested on July 26, 2016 and remanded in custody on July 29, a few days after the failed July 15, 2016 coup attempt against President Tayyip Erdogan.
Turkish authorities suspected her of “being a member of a terrorist organization and / or participating” in the coup attempt, mainly because she was working for the then-close media outlet of Fethullah Gulen, a former ally of Erdogan who became “Black sheep” and Ankara considers that it organized the coup, reminds the ECHR in a statement.
Nazli Ilicak had also posted on Twitter on July 15 and 16, 2016, in which she expressed doubts that Gulen’s move was behind the coup attempt.
Ilicak, who denies the allegations, was sentenced in 2018 to life in prison, a sentence reduced in 2019 to a second-degree sentence of eight years and nine months for “voluntarily offering assistance to a terrorist organization”.
He was released the same day and remanded in custody, along with renowned journalist and intellectual Ahmet Altan, who was arrested again a few weeks later and released in April.
In its ruling, the ECtHR, which in recent years has multiplied Turkey’s convictions in similar cases following the mass persecution following the coup attempt, “considers that there was no valid reason to consider (the plaintiff) a suspect” for participation. to a “terrorist organization” or that it attempted to overthrow the Ankara government.
The texts on which the Turkish judiciary’s suspicions are based, in particular its Twitter messages, were in fact “discussions of public interest”, “did not support or promote the use of force in the political sphere” and did not contain any “indication of possible will”. “… to contribute to the illegal targets of terrorist organizations”, underlines the European Court of Human Rights.
Ilicak’s detention is therefore “an ‘interference’ in her exercise of her right to freedom of expression,” said the Strasbourg-based court, which concluded that provisions of its European Convention on Human Rights had been violated. Human Rights for the “right to freedom and security” and the “freedom of expression”.
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