Last week, university student Esila Ayık was released after 40 days in detention following her arrest for holding a banner calling Türkiye’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, a dictator at a protest in Istanbul. The protest was against the politically motivated arrest and detention of Istanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu in March and the subsequent arrests of students during the demonstrations that followed. Ayık was charged with “insulting the president,” (article 299 of the Turkish penal code) a crime for which she could still face up to a four-year prison sentence. Her detention became a focus of media concern due to her chronic kidney and heart conditions.
Ayık’s case is just the latest in a pattern of similar abusive detentions and prosecutions. The European Court of Human Rights has in case after case found Türkiye to have violated the right to freedom of expression in pursuing these prosecutions, and in 2021 ruled that the crime of “insulting the president” conflicts with the right and should be amended. Yet the Turkish authorities continue to use it to prosecute thousands.
Swedish journalist Joakim Medin is one of them. On April 30, an Istanbul court handed him an 11-month suspended sentence for his newspaper’s use of a photograph of an effigy of Erdogan at a 2023 demonstration in Stockholm with his news coverage of the event. He was released from detention on May 16 and able to return to Sweden.
Lawyer Burak Saldıroğlu was likewise charged with insult earlier this month. Two days after he garnered significant social media attention for posting a witty reaction to the blocking of jailed mayor İmamoğlu’s Turkish-language X account, an Istanbul court ordered his detention pending trial for insult based on an old post he made questioning whether the president was “in his right mind.”
There is no question but that the banner, the news article, and the social media post fall within the boundaries of protected speech. They are not evidence of a crime, nor justify any measure of detention.
While international standards mean that around the world this offence has fallen into disuse and is disappearing from the books, available Ministry of Justice statistics show that in Türkiye in 2021 over 11,000 people were prosecuted for “insulting the president.” The ministry hasn’t disclosed the figures for this and other offenses since 2021, which undoubtedly run into the tens of thousands. The figures should be published, but above all the government should stop charging people with “insulting the president,” and scrap this offence which has no place in a democratic society.
