OSCE watchdog is latest to blast 'Islamist' Turkey on lack of press freedom. HT: mcclatchydc.
ISTANBUL — A leading international human rights watchdog slammed Turkey on Friday for passing new laws that she said would further intimidate independent journalists in a country where freedom of expression is already severely limited and the news media have become “critically stifled.”Dunja Mijatovic of the Vienna-based Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe singled out a new intelligence law that threatens journalists with up to 10 years in prison “for simply doing their work” on the heels of a law passed earlier this year that banned thousands of websites.
“What I find most alarming is that the direction of the latest developments in Turkey points toward more and more restrictions,” Mijatovic told a conference on the rule of law.
The main message is very simple, she told McClatchy: “Hands off the media; hands off journalists. No imprisonment should be allowed for anything that journalists write or broadcast.”
Erdogan’s Office of Public Diplomacy didn’t respond to a request for comment on key points of Mijatovic’s statement.
But he’s shown himself extraordinarily thin-skinned over recent criticism of media restrictions. He had a public spat with Germany’s widely respected president, Joachim Gauck, after Gauck, an ordained Lutheran minister, told an audience in Ankara that he found the ban on Twitter “frightening.”
Erdogan dressed him down in public. “I told the German president that we will never tolerate his interference in the internal affairs of our country,” he said. Gauck “probably still thinks he is a priest.”Read the full story here.
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