Free speech on trial in Turkey

Pamuk faces three years in prison if convicted, though often such cases end in payment of fines.

Still, the number of cases is mounting, bringing opprobrium from the US and Europe - which has expressed "serious concern" and tasked an envoy with following the trial - as well as from human rights organizations.

"The trial of Orhan Pamuk will show the world which direction Turkish justice is heading," Holly Cartner, the Europe and Central Asia director of Human Rights Watch said in a statement.

The group notes recent training of some Turkish judges and prosecutors in the law of the European Court of Human Rights, which has ruled that free expression "includes the right to criticize public institutions in very strong terms."

But that may not be the case under the current law, passed last year and designed to be in accord with EU requirements. Most of the free speech cases involve Articles 288 and 301 of the Turkish Penal Code.

Commenting on the case earlier this week, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan complained that widespread support for Pamuk from "international pressure groups" was putting undue pressure on the judiciary.

Erdogan also explained how much things have changed in Turkey since he was imprisoned for reading an Islamic poem in public, breaking Turkey's strictly secular law.

"At the time when I went to prison, there was no one who came to talk to me about respect for the rule of law or human rights ... so I find this somewhat of a double standard," Erdogan told the Sydney Morning Herald.

Critics have noted the limited positive change, and want the apparent reversal stopped.

"It is so self-defeating," Sahin says of the effort to quell free speech. "Orhan Pamuk is not going to go to jail. Orhan Pamuk is only going to sell more books."

• The celebrated Turkish author told a Swiss newspaper in February that "30,000 Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it." He said security forces shared responsibility for the death of the Kurds in southeast Turkey during separatist fighting in the 1980s and 1990s.

• The case was brought for "insulting Turkish identity" under article 301 of the criminal code. Pamuk faces up to three years in jail if convicted.

• Pamuk's novels, translated into dozens of languages, include "My Name is Red," "Snow," and "The White Castle." The novels deal with the clash between past and present, East and West, secularism and Islamism.

• Pamuk won the Peace Prize of Germany's book trade association, Germany's highest literary honor, in October.

Source: Reuters

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