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27 Suspects On Trial Over Tweets Acquitted

22.09.2014 19:05

Twenty-seven of the 29 suspects who stood trial for supporting the anti-government Gezi protests of last year on social media have been acquitted of the charges leveled against them.Last year, 29 users in İzmir were charged with “provoking the public not to obey the law” by tweeting pro-Gezi messages.

Twenty-seven of the 29 suspects who stood trial for supporting the anti-government Gezi protests of last year on social media have been acquitted of the charges leveled against them.

Last year, 29 users in İzmir were charged with “provoking the public not to obey the law” by tweeting pro-Gezi messages online. The İzmir 22nd Criminal Court of First Instance heard the trial, in which the prosecutor asked for up to three years in jail for the Twitter users.

Suspect Egemen Çiynekli, however, was not acquitted. He was given a TL 8,100 fine for tweeting insults online. Furthermore, the court file on Efecan Karakaş, one of the suspects at large, has been separated from the rest.

On June 5, 2013, the İzmir Police Department detained 38 people over their tweets, accusing them of inciting the people not to obey Turkey's laws.

Turkey has long been criticized internationally over violations of free speech. The country has the highest number of journalists in jail, according to 2013 data from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).

The country has also been increasingly hostile towards social media and introduced several restrictions to Internet use. Changes made in February of this year to the country's Internet laws have introduced provisions forcing Internet service providers (ISPs) to retain digital data for between one and two years. The law has also introduced provisions protecting personnel of the Telecommunications Directorate (TİB) against legal action over violations of rights and the law that they might commit in the course of their job.

Last month, Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a report about Internet freedoms in Turkey, which it said “has an abysmal record of protecting free expression online.”

The country's spy agency has also been given extensive powers of Internet surveillance.

Turkey blocked Twitter in March, literally hours after President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who was prime minister at the time, called it “the worst menace to society.” The micro-blogging site remained blocked for two weeks in spite of lower court orders to remove the ban. YouTube was also banned by the Turkish authorities in April 2014, following the leak of the recording of a security summit attended by the country's top security officials. The site remained blocked for about two months.

The Gezi protests, which started as a sit-in protest in İstanbul to protect a rare green area that the authorities wanted to turn into a shopping mall last year, turned into massive anti-government demonstrations that spread to all the 81 provinces in a matter of days and lasted for about two months.

(Cihan/Today's Zaman)



 
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