Index on Censorship’s conference Taking the Offensive, held at London’s Southbank Centre highlighted how artistic freedom in the UK is under threat. The conference focused on how arts organisations support artistic freedom especially when controversy is arises.
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Fifteen years after she was detained for allegedly perpetrating a terrorist attack in Istanbul’s Spice Bazaar, and eleven years after she was acquitted of those charges, the Turkish sociologist Pınar Selek again found herself on the wrong side of the law when Turkey’s High Court sentenced her to aggravated life imprisonment last week. The Court issued an arrest warrant, which was sent to Interpol, since Selek is living in Strasbourg, where she is pursuing her doctoral studies.
Turkish sociologist Pınar Selek has been sentenced to life in prison
Selek’s court case had been controversial from the beginning. The attack with which she was originally charged, which killed seven people and injured 127, came at a time when the conflict between Turkey and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party was at its peak. For some months after the event took place, the media reported that the explosion was caused by a gas leak.
But this account of events changed when Turkish police detained a Kurdish man who, it was claimed, had been responsible for preparing a bomb. He mentioned Selek’s name while in custody and confessed to preparing together with her the bomb which he then placed in the Bazaar.
At the time of her detention Selek had been researching Turkey’s minorities and politically marginalised groups. During her interrogation she was asked to reveal the names of persons she interviewed while working on her studies. She said she was subjected to torture and it was later revealed that the deposition of the first man had also been taken under torture. Months after his interrogation, the man denied even knowing Selek.
He was released and so was Selek, but only after spending two-and-a-half years in prison.
According to the prosecutor’s initial reports, there was evidence showing the explosion was caused by a bomb. Later, Istanbul University’s Analytic Chemistry Department and Cerrahpaşa Medical Faculty’s Forensic Departments issued reports challenging that version of events, having concluded that the explosion was resulted by a gas leak.
The case went back and forth from one court to another. In the course of 11 years following her first acquittal Selek was acquitted two more times before being sentenced again on 24 January. The history of the case had become so complicated that it began to sound like a story straight from the pages of Dickens’s Bleak House.
Life imprisonment is currently the most serious sentence in Turkey after the country abolished capital punishment in peacetime in 2002. Selek’s lawyers appealed the sentence on Tuesday and said they would bring the case to European Court of Human Rights.
Writing in the Al-Monitor website, Turkish columnist Cengiz Çandar argued that Selek’s case would go down in history as a notorious example of judicial miscarriage and compared it to France’s notorious Dreyfus affair.
“The story of the trial, known as the Pınar Selek case, easily dwarfs the Dreyfus case in comparison,” he wrote.
Timothy Garton Ash is Professor of European Studies at Oxford University, and a noted author and commentator. Here he tells Nigel Warburton about his Free Speech Debate project, a forum for discussing global free speech standards in the digital age
A woman who said she was raped by state security forces and the journalist who interviewed her were charged by police on 29 January in Somalia. Journalist Abdiaziz Abdinur Ibrahim could face four years imprisonment for insulting a government body and two years for inducing false evidence. Abdiaziz has been charged with insulting a government body, simulating a criminal offence and making a false accusation. The alleged rape victim’s husband and two others who introduced her to the journalist were charged with assisting her to secure a profit for the rape allegation and assisting her to evade investigation. The sentences are five and four year terms respectively. The next hearing will be held on 2 February. Abdiaziz had interviewed the woman on 8 January after she said she was raped by soldiers at a displaced persons camp in Mogadishu. He was detained by the Central Investigations Department of the police two days later.
Non-thinker (2012) by Aida Makoto – A less controversial piece from the Japanese artist
The New York Times has claimed it was hacked by Chinese officials over a period of four months. The attacks are thought to have come from hackers connected to the military in a possible retaliation to a series of stories run by the newspaper — alluding to the vast wealth accumulated by premier of the state council Wen Jiabao. The hackers entered into the Times’s systems, accessing information on the personal computers of 53 employees, including China correspondents. Mandiant, an internet security company hired by the newspaper on 7 November, said the attacks were likely to have been part of a spy campaign, after discovering that the computers used for the attacks were the same used for Chinese military attacks on US military contractors in the past. Hackers began attacking the Times on 13 September, around the time the Wen Jiabao story was in its final pre-publishing stages.
A former policeman in the Ukraine has been sentenced to life in prison for the murder of an investigative journalist, it was reported on 30 January. Oleksiy Pukache was the fourth person to be charged with the murder of Georgiy Gongadze, after his dismembered body was discovered in 2000. The other three were sentenced to 12 and 13 years. As Pukache was sentenced, he announced that equal blame for the murder should be placed on the country’s former president Leonid Kuchma and then presidential chief of staff Volodymyr Lytvyn.
Gongadze’s headless body was found in the woods six weeks after he was kidnapped in Kiev — a case which caused huge demonstrations and helped prompt the 2004 Orange Revolution. A lawsuit taken out against Kuchma in March 2011 was dismissed when prosecutors deemed it unlawful.
A Chinese man who was sent to a labour camp for making a joke about politician Bo Xilai has received minor damages after his compensation appeal was rejected. Fang Hong was sentenced to re-education for a year in 2011 for posting a poem online mocking the disgraced politician and his then police chief Wang Lijun. Chongqing’s Dianjiang county court rejected Fang’s request for around £37,400 in psychological damages, instead offering him just over £5,800, as well as rejecting his appeal for a public apology. This was the first known case of officials compensating for Bo-era abuses. Fang said he would ask his lawyers about appealing the ruling, but critics said his initial appeal was rejected to prevent a stream of further claims. Fang was freed in 2012 following the fall of Bo — whose wife Gu Kailai was convicted of the murder of British Businessman Neil Heywood in November 2011.
An art exhibition in Japan depicting cannibalism and Sadomasochism has prompted a debate over artistic freedom of expression. Aida Makoto’s Monument for Nothing exhibition at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo on 29 January caused protests from Japanese organisation People Against Pornography and Sexual Violence, who wrote to museum director Nanjo Fumio to demand Makoto’s work be removed. Some of the artists pieces, depicted a giant blender filled with naked women, as well as Japanese pensioners playing croquet with severed heads. Makoto is said to use pornography to prompt people to look beneath Japan’s calm exterior and examine the darker elements of Japanese culture.