Turkey Relaxes “Insulting Turkishness” Laws #
This is good news, even if it’s only happening slowly.
Turkey’s government has taken on the issue of free speech and is expected as early as Friday to announce a weakening of a law against insulting Turkishness, an amendment that is considered a key measure of the democratic maturity of this Muslim country as it tries to gain acceptance to the European Union.
But while that law, called Article 301, is known to many in the West — Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel Prize-winning Turkish novelist, was prosecuted under 301 — it is just one of many laws that limit freedom of expression for intellectuals in Turkey. The law under which Mr. Yayla was prosecuted, for example, dates from 1951 and is not even part of the penal code.
While the change in Article 301 is likely to stop the wanton application of that law, the single most common statute used against critics of Turkey’s official line, the government was unable to remove it from the books completely, as liberals here had wanted.