Journalist arrested – ‘insulting’ Erdogan

– There is a saying that the crowned head is wiser, said the well-known TV journalist Seddik Kapas of the opposition TV channel Tele1, but we see that it is not true.

The bull does not become a king because it enters the palace, but turns into a barn.

Capas was detained at her home overnight until Saturday, just hours after she made the comments and then posted them on Twitter to her 900,000 followers, according to her lawyer.

On Sunday, she was arrested after the judge went to the prosecutor’s side that there was a risk of her escaping.

“It is clear that the so-called journalist insults our president on a TV channel that has no aim other than to spread hatred,” Erdogan’s spokeswoman Fahrettin Altun wrote on Twitter.

The Turkish Journalists’ Union describes Kapas’ arrest as a “serious attack on freedom of expression”.

The offense of insulting the president is punishable by imprisonment for a period of no less than one year and not more than four years. Since 2014, more than 35,500 cases of insults to Erdogan have been reported and nearly 13,000 have led to convictions.

Turkey is one of the countries in the world that imprisons the largest number of journalists. The country receives frequent criticism for undermining press freedom and shutting down media critical of the government, a development that escalated after the failed coup attempt against Erdogan in July 2016.

Reporters Without Borders ranked Turkey 153 out of 180 in its 2021 Press Freedom Index.