Turkey: world champion violator of right to freedom of speech

PanARMENIAN.Net - In a report published on the website of the Gatestone Institute Sunday, March 13, Ankara-based journalist and Turkey analyst Uzay Bulut describes the country as a world champion violator of right to freedom of speech. According to her, Turkey has normalized hate especially against ethnic minorities living in the country.

“In Turkey, if someone utters the most vicious or threatening remarks about Armenians, Greeks, Jews, Christians, Kurds, Alevis or other members of a minority, he is never condemned by the state or held to account. But those who speak of human rights abuses, or criticize the state for its violent, repressive actions, will most probably be accused of violations,” the report suggests.

The publication goes on to read:

“In 1996, at Turkey's parliament, the interior minister at the time, Meral Aksener, and a current MP from the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), said that the leader of the PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party), Abdullah Ocalan, was "Armenian semen." She then clarified the remark by saying, "I did not refer to the Armenians living in Turkey. I referred to the Armenian race in general."

What makes this hate speech even more disturbing is that these people -- Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, and Jews, among others -- are the indigenous peoples of Asia Minor, Mesopotamia and Thrace, where they have lived for millennia.

Today, as a result of Turkey's massacres, pogroms and deportations, they have been turned into tiny communities.

After committing crimes against these native people, Turkey not only denies the realities of this history, but insults and threatens the remaining members of those groups. It also represses whoever would like to discuss these issues. The only people who seem to enjoy "freedom" completely are those engaging in hate speech.

Citizens of other countries who live in Turkey are also exposed to prohibitions on free speech.

Norma Cox, an American academic who worked as a lecturer at Turkish universities during the 1980s, was deported and banned from re-entering Turkey by order of the Turkish Ministry of the Interior in 1986, 1989 and 1996. She has been unable to return to Turkey ever since.

The Ministry of the Interior claimed that Cox had been expelled and banned because of her separatist activities against national security, "namely statements she had made about Turks assimilating Kurds and Armenians, and Turks forcing Armenians out of the country and committing genocide."

Cox's application to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) said: "Expressing opinions on Kurdish and Armenian issues at a university, where freedom of expression should be unlimited, could not be used as a justification for any sanctions, such as the ban on her re-entry into Turkey."

In 2010, the ECHR convicted Turkey of violating Cox's freedom of expression.

While hate speech and racism are warmly tolerated and even promoted by state authorities, free debate on Turkey's social and political issues such as the Kurdish question and the PKK, Armenian genocide, history of Pontic Greeks, and the Christian roots, among others, are criminalized.

Turkish law professor Ayse Isil Karakas, both a judge and elected Deputy Head of the ECHR, said that among all member states, Turkey has ranked number one in the field of violations of free speech.

"619 lawsuits of freedom of expression were brought at the ECHR between 1959 and 2015," she said. "258 of them -- almost half of them -- came from Turkey and most were convicted as violations of freedom of expression."