Experts Hold Workshop to Discuss Turkey's Growing Censorship
A group of people gathered in the northwest mountains of Turkey last week – and it wasn’t to cheer on the national football team in the Euro 2008 Cup.
The Eurasia Daily Monitor reports that a group of lawyers, academics, and Internet professionals gathered in Abant, Turkey on June 18 and 19 to discuss the country’s growing Internet censorship. These experts aimed to “define the border between societal values and individual freedoms,” Today’s Zaman details. The two-day workshop, sponsored by the Ankar Bar Association and turk.internet.com, convened in an attempt to find solutions for the disturbing frequency by which the Turkish government has been blocking Web sites, especially in the last year. So far, YouTube and several blogs - reportedly including the CNN Political Ticker - were blocked.
Turkey’s censorship policies have been coming under fire since the government adopted Internet Publication Law No. 5651 in 2007, which includes stricter guidelines for what is deemed appropriate online content. The most noteworthy of these stipulations is one which has remained a constant feature of the country’s legislation since 1951: the prohibition of denigrating the memory of the Republic of Turkey’s founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk – a crime which has landed several journalists in prison over the years.
Sure, there are many other governments which censor online content, and an even greater number that target printed materials criticizing government officials or celebrated religious or cultural figures. Article 301 of Turkey’s penal code – which criminalizes dissenting opinions of “Turkishness” or the “Republic” - makes it no different from such countries. What does make it different, however, is its geopolitical position. Not only is it a state which some political theorists would call a “democracy in transition,” but it seems to be perpetually straddled both geographically and politically between several divergent forces: East and West, Religious and Secular, and now, it hinges on a delicate balance between having a “mostly free and open internet” and one which extensively “filters the content that their citizens see” – as John Palfrey noted in February.
The fact remains, however, that the Turkish government has been censoring its citizens for a long time – especially in the arts or regarding discussions of the Armenian Genocide – using Ataturk’s founding philosophy of “one nation, one language, one history, one culture” as a premise for extreme censorship practices both through legislative and judicial acts (acts which, by the way, could harm its chances of joining the EU.) Yet, whether the challenge Turkey faces is really about “societal values and individual freedoms,” or the tension between its religious roots and secular ambitions, meetings such as the one in Abant are crucial building blocks in affecting which way the country will lean regarding Internet filtering.
