New York, March 27, 2014–The Committee to Protect Journalists welcomes the release this week of at least eight imprisoned journalists in Turkey, but calls on Turkish authorities to scrap the charges against them and release all of the journalists jailed in the country.
“While we welcome Turkey’s move to release journalists from prison, we reiterate that they should never have been jailed in the first place,” said CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon. “As long as the charges are pending, and the threat of jail persists, the Turkish media will be deterred from independent and critical reporting.”
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Separately today, Turkish authorities blocked YouTube. The Turkish Telecommunications authority TIB said it had taken “administrative measures” against the video-sharing website, according to news reports. The move came after a leaked voice recording was posted on the website in which Turkish officials were allegedly heard discussing possible intervention into neighboring Syria, the reports said. The measure follows the government’s shutdown of Twitter on March 21.
Turkey’s telecoms authority lifted a two-week-old ban on Twitter, according to an official in Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s office, following Wednesday’s constitutional court ruling.
Two weeks ago, in the run up to the March 30 municipal elections, the government closed down Twitter across the country. However, Turkey’s tech-savvy twitterati shared methods to bypass the ban on Facebook, WhatsApp and by text message as related hashtags trended worldwide.
On March 20, Erdogan made an election speech in the western city of Bursa in which he threatened to “eradicate” what he called “Twitter Schmitter”.
