Some have drawn parallels between Say’s case and that of the
Russian band Pussy Riot who staged an impromptu punk
performance at Moscow’s main cathedral in February in
protest against President Vladimir Putin and the Russian
Orthodox Church hierarchy. The three women were convicted of
hooliganism motivated by religious hatred, but they insist
that their protest was political in nature and not an attack
on religion.
Turkey has a history of persecuting its artists and writers,
and the European Union has long encouraged the nation to
improve freedom of speech if it wants to become a member of
the bloc one day.
In a report on Turkey’s progress toward membership issued
last week, the EU criticized Turkey for “recurring
infringements of the right to liberty and security and to a
fair trial, as well as of the freedom of expression.” It
said restrictions on media freedoms and an increasing number
of court cases against writers and journalists remained
“serious issues.”
Turkey’s Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk has been prosecuted for
his comments about the mass killings of Armenians under a law
that made it a crime to insult the Turkish identity before
the government eased that law in an amendment in 2008. In
2007, ethnic Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, who received
death threats because of his comments about the killings of
Armenians by Turks in 1915, was shot dead outside his office
in Istanbul.
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