TUSIAD to Ankara: If you don't get rid of article 301, at least change it
Güncelleme Tarihi:
The new head of the Turkish Association of Businessmen and Industrialists, (TUSIAD), Arzuhan Dogan Sabanci, has written a second letter to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan urging him to push for changes to controversial Turkish Penal Code article 301.
The letter, which was sent in mid-February, recalls the murder of Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in Istanbul, calling for "a plan of action" to protect freedom of expression in Turkey. The letter stresses that the first step in such a "plan of action" should be changes made to article 301, which makes it a crime to insult "Turkishness, the Turkish Republic, or the Turkish Parliament." Defenders of the article insist that the actual implementation of the article depends wholly on the interpretive skills of the judge or judges in cases where people are being tried on charges of violating article 301. The TUSIAD letter notes that if article 301 is not to be completely lifted from the Turkish Penal Code, it should at least go through serious changes.
The first letter from TUSIAD to the administration on the subject of article 301 was written by former TUSIAD head Omer Sabanci, and was sent to Ankara in the immediate run-up to the trial of writer Elif Safak, who faced charged of violating the controversial article. Safak was acquitted on all charges during the first hour of her trial.