Standing up for freedom of speech
THE decision by a Turkish court to try journalists Can Dundar and Erdem Gul with revealing state secrets and to do so in private is deeply worrying.
They are part of a pattern of media suppression by the Turkish government that included the placing under state control earlier this month of the country’s biggest newspaper, the 600,000 circulation Zaman.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has built himself palaces while relentlessly cracking down on public criticism. Questions about the role of the state and the actions of leaders need not be hostile to cause problems for any government. But they are a fundamental part of democracy.
Erdogan insists Dundar and Gul were wrong to report that the Turkish government had tried to ship arms to Islamists in Syria, even though there is video evidence.
The media does not always get it right but the way to deal with disputes is not to hold a trial in a closed court. Vibrant modern economies and democratic political systems need a free press.
But Turkey is not the only country to experience what Dundar calls a “chilling effect” of policies designed to silence an entire profession.
This week 20 people have been held in China, their whereabouts unknown, after a letter calling on president Xi Jinping to resign was posted on a state-supported news website. Xi has told journalists their primary duty is to obey the communist party.
But an uneasy truce between the intelligentsia and the government, which has seen a tolerance of such comment during times of economic boom, now appears under pressure.
In the EUf, Poland’s right-wing Law and Justice party, led by Jarosław Kaczynski, has published a bill that will hand the government the power to appoint or dismiss the heads of public broadcasters. Newspapers critical of the government are criticised for being unpatriotic.
Poland’s “reforms” are widely seen as modelled on those instituted in 2010 by Hungarian Prime minister Viktor Orbán when he gained power. In pursuit of his stated goal of destroying Europe’s “liberal identity” he has clamped down relentlessly on press freedom.
The arrival of a number of authoritarian regimes, bolstering their power by exploiting among other issues the migrant crisis and the terrorism threat, is of great concern. Their approach is wrong in principle, but it is ultimately doomed to failure.
As Abdulhamit Bilici, editor in chief of Turkey’s Zaman pointed out, it is ever more difficult to crack down on freedom of speech in this social media age. “I believe that free media will continue even if we have to write on the walls,” he said.
But he also pointed out that spray paint and chalk are unlikely to be necessary. “I don’t think it is possible to silence media in the digital age.”
That may be so, but when the Committee to Protect Journalists says that, despite robust rhetoric, the EU is doing too little to protect press freedom, it is correct.
Having sat on its hands while Orbán made his reforms in Hungary, the EU must do a much better job of defending freedom of speech in Poland as well as putting further pressure on Turkey.