Kurtul, Aytekin Kaan Author aut Text xx# 2023 Verfassungsblog 2023-01-05 eng

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On 21 April 1998, the then mayor of İstanbul, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was sentenced to one year (subsequently reduced to ten months) in prison and a hefty fine by the State Security Court of Diyarbakır for “incitement to hatred and hostility on grounds of religious discrimination”. His criminal act was that of reading two provocative verses from the poem “Divine Army” by Cevat Örnek (“the minarets are bayonets, the domes are helmets / mosques are our barracks, the faithful our soldiers”) during a rally of the Islamist Welfare Party (of “Strasbourg fame”) in 1997. Twenty-five years after the aforementioned rally, Turkey experienced a free speech case involving another conservative-leaning political figure on the rise: on 14 December 2022, İstanbul’s mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu was sentenced by İstanbul’s 7th Criminal Court of First Instance to a term of imprisonment of two years, seven months and fifteen days for criminal defamation. CC BY-SA 4.0 Kurtul, Aytekin Kaan Defamation Erdogan Free Speech Imamoglu Turkey 342 https://verfassungsblog.de/interfering-with-free-speech-and-the-fate-of-turkey/ 2366-7044 Max Steinbeis Verfassungsblog gGmbH 10.17176/20230106-001527-0 230105 10.17176/20230106-001527-0 Converted from MARCXML to MODS version 3.7 using MARC21slim2MODS3-7.xsl (Revision 1.140 20200717)