A Turkish court on Saturday ordered a famous journalist in the country, Sedef Kabas, to be arrested pending trial on charges of insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The information is from the CNN network in Turkey.
Police detained Kabas overnight and took her to a police station in Istanbul. Then he transferred her to the city court, where the court ruled in favor of her formal arrest.
Kabas used traditional Turkish proverbs to make references to Erdogan, but did not explicitly mention the politician’s name.
“There is a very famous saying that a crowned head becomes wiser. But we see that is not true,” said Kabas.
“When cattle enter a palace, they don’t become king, but the palace becomes a granary,” added the journalist.
Merdan Yanardag, editor-in-chief of the Tele 1 channel on which Kabas made the comment during a live broadcast, harshly criticized the journalist’s arrest.
“Your 2am detention over a proverb is unacceptable,” he wrote on Twitter. “This stance is an attempt to intimidate journalists, the media and society.”
The law dealing with insults to the president provides for a prison sentence ranging from one to four years. Thousands of people have been charged and sentenced for insulting Erdogan in the seven years since he rose from prime minister to president.
Since 2014, when Erdogan became president, 160,169 investigations have been launched with this justification, 35,507 cases have been shelved and there have been 12,881 convictions.
“The honor of the presidential office is the honor of our country. I condemn the vulgar insults made against our president and his cabinet,” Fahrettin Altun, head of Turkey’s Communications Directorate, wrote on Twitter.
Erdogan took over as Turkey’s prime minister in 2003 from the Islamist and conservative AKP party. He stayed in office until 2014, when his party barred him from running for a fourth term. He then elected himself president and increased the powers of the office.
After concentrating powers, Erdogan defeated a coup against him in 2016 and started a wave of repression and purges – arresting opponents and public officials and closing down information vehicles.
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