The sixth hearing of the trial against staff and journalists of Turkey’s Cumhuriyet newspaper will take place tomorrow, March 9.

The hearing, in which International Press Institute (IPI) members Kadri Gürsel, Ahmet Şık and Murat Sabuncu are among the defendants, was moved to Silivri Prison outside Istanbul, where Şık and Sabuncu have been in pretrial detention for over 14 months.

IPI Turkey Advocacy Coordinator, Caroline Stockford will be in attendance to monitor the trial. In a statement today to the Turkish opposition daily Evrensel, she said: “IPI believes that the rule of law must be stringently upheld at tomorrow’s trial of Cumhuriyet’s staff and journalists. We will be observing this and future journalist trials. We call for the full acquittal of our members Kadri Gürsel, Ahmet Şık, Murat Sabuncu and their colleagues. We call on Turkey to free all journalists in detention, allow them to resume an active role in their profession and to allow news to flow freely once again in Turkey.”

Defendants in the case stand accused of “aiding a terrorist organisation whist not being a member”, among other charges. They face up between seven and 43 years in prison.

Brief overview of indictment

The original indictment was issued against defendants Can Dündar, Akın Atalay, Mehmet Erinç, Bülent Utku, Murat Sabuncu, Kadri Gürsel, Güray Öz, Önder Çelik, Turhan Günay, Musa Kart, Hakan Karasinir, Mustafa Güngör, Aydın Engin, Hikmet Çetinkaya, Bülent Yener, Günseli Özaltay, Ahmet Aydoğdu and İlhan Tanır, all of whom are executives and past and present employees of Cumhuriyet.

The indictment begins by noting the historic establishment of the paper, founded upon the orders of founding president of the Republic of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. It goes on to criticise the paper for allegedly having veered, especially in the last three years, from its original editorial line set 94 years earlier. In the indictment, the newspaper is accused of having changed its editorial line with the aim of “making terrorist organisations appear ‘more likeable and legitimate’“ and of associating the State of the Republic of Turkey with international terrorist organizations.

The “evidence” in the indictment is made up almost entirely of news articles and tweets. Defendant and Cumhuriyet journalist Aydın Engin yesterday highlighted the fact raised by the campaign group Unjailed Journalists (Dışardaki Gazeteciler) that the word “news” appears 667 times in the indictment.

The “idiosyncratic” indictment also contains a section under which newspaper articles taken from publications strongly opposed to Cumhuriyet are listed as “News Reports and Articles that are Deemed to be Crime Reports and Evidence Included in the National Press and on Internet News Sites”.

In this section, pro-government columnist Cem Küçük is quoted as accusing Cumhuriyet of the very role an opposition newspaper aims to fulfil, that of engaging in critical reporting. Küçük wrote that the paper had “put the government in a difficult position by suggesting that they were aiding ISIS” and that Cumhuriyet’s editorial line “began to place the government of the Republic of Turkey in a difficult position”.

The indictment, which itself declares to have been written hurriedly so that lengthy pretrial detentions might be avoided, does nothing more than demonstrate how healthy opposition reporting by Cumhuriyet has been carried out.

It is clear from these pages – which frequently accuse the paper of “perception management” of the public – that the Turkish state is highly sensitive to criticism and is prepared to detain journalists and management without trial in order to deter other journalists still actively reporting in Turkey.

During his defence statement on August 11, 2017, Cumhuriyet Executive Board Chair Akın Atalay summed up the position of the prosecution by saying, “This prosecution has two mutually complementary aims. The first is to take over Cumhuriyet newspaper or silence it. The second is to show the end that awaits newspapers and journalists who contemplate or entertain the idea of publishing news undesired by the political rulership and articles that will not be to its liking.”

The indictment accuses Cumhuriyet of allying itself with terrorists by citing the fact that the paper reported on a government mole active on Twitter under the name of Fuat Avni. The indictment goes on to say, “With ours being a country numbering among the top three globally in terms of social media use, it has been seen that perception management operations of this nature can be communicated to very wide masses.”

“The indictment in the Cumhuriyet case portrays as a crime precisely the work that balanced, investigative reporting should fulfil”, Stockford said.

She added: “The punishment,in the form of pre-trial detention of so many of Turkey’s journalists has denied the public the right to develop an informed opinion and has infringed the rights of said journalists to the presumption of innocence, the right to appear speedily before a judge and the right to personal freedom.”

The defendants are expected to finish giving their defences on Friday after which the prosecutor is expected to give his opinion and recommendations for sentencing.

Given that IPI members Şık and Sabuncu have spent over 400 days each in solitary pretrial detention on “evidence” that consists of journalistic articles and social media posts, IPI calls again for their release and acquittal.