Her hopes for the appeal procedure were in vain: in Turkey, more former employees of the newspaper „Cumhuriyet“ have to go to jail. A court confirmed the judgments of the lower court.
Six former employees of the government-critical newspaper „Cumhuriyet“ have to go to jail after a failed appeal. Among other things, the cartoonist Musa Kart and the reporter Güray Öz their prison sentence, as the lawyer Abbas Yalcin the German Press Agency confirmed.
In total, 14 „Cumhuriyet“ employees were sentenced to several years in prison for supporting terrorist organizations last April. The appeal of eight defendants who were sentenced to less than five years had failed in February. The prosecutor now asked six of them to take their custody.
As evidence in the internationally prosecuted process were mainly used articles from the „Cumhuriyet“. Some of the convicts, who considered the trial politically motivated, were in custody for more than a year.
The pressure keeps growing
The media in Turkey have been under pressure for a long time. The organization Reporters Without Borders (ROG) recently wrote that since the July 2016 coup attempt, the „witch hunt“ of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government has worsened against critical journalists. Turkey is still ranked 157 on the current ROG ranking of press freedom.
In autumn 2018 there was a change of power at the head of the „Cumhuriyet“. Many employees then left the newspaper.
