The International Press Institute (IPI) today call for a Turkish Constitutional Court ruling ordering the release of two jailed journalists to be implemented immediately.
The Constitutional Court said Thursday that the rights of journalists Mehmet Altan and Şahin Alpay, who have spent more than a year behind bars, had been violated. The decision was welcomed as potentially setting a precedent for all of Turkey’s nearly 150 jailed journalists.
However, late yesterday two lower criminal courts refused to release Altan and Alpay, citing the fact that the Constitutional Court’s ruling had not yet been published in the official gazette. In an apparent response, the Constitutional Court later tweeted the full text of its decision.
In a further troubling development, Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Bekir Bozdağ, a former justice minister, took to Twitter early Friday morning to slam the Constitutional Court for “overstepping its bounds”.
The Constitutional Court is seen as a last bastion of the rule of law in Turkey, where the government has purged thousands of judges, attorneys and prosecutors deemed insufficiently loyal following a failed July 2016 coup attempt. Due process guarantees have been largely hollowed out as a result, with large numbers of journalists arrested without charge and held for months in pre-trial detention with arbitrary limits on outside contact and interference with their right to mount a legal defence.
IPI Executive Director Barbara Trionfi urged Turkish authorities to respect the ruling of the Constitutional Court, whose authority she termed an “essential element of a functioning democratic system”.
“As it has in the past, Turkey’s Constitutional Court yesterday bravely demonstrated a willingness to protect fundamental rights despite the intense pressure levelled against it by the current government,” she said. “Turkey’s refusal so far to honour the Court’s decision to free journalists Mehmet Altan and Şahin Alpay demonstrates the extent to which the rule of law has been undermined in the country.”
“The Constitutional Court was clear in its ruling. Mehmet Altan and Şahin Alpay were detained unlawfully and in violation of their fundamental rights. In a democratic system, the Court’s decisions must be respected. Altan and Alpay must be released without delay.”
This is not the first time that the Constitutional Court has found itself in the Turkish government’s crosshairs. After the Court ordered the release of prominent journalists Can Dündar and Erdem Gül in March 2016, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said the ruling was “against the country and its people” and warned the Court against issuing further rulings that would place “its existence and legitimacy up for debate”.
In its decision on Thursday, the Constitutional Court cited the Dündar and Gül case in emphasising that “press freedom as a specific element of freedom of expression has vital importance in democracies. Thus, press freedom includes not only the dissemination of ideas and information but also society’s access to them.”
Government officials appeared to be aware of the similarities between the cases. On Twitter, Bozdağ called Thursday’s decision “a bad and wrong repetition of the ruling in Can Dündar’s case”.
