A Turkish court has sentenced Kurdish journalist Serdar Altan to one-and-a-half years in prison on terrorism-related charges in a retrial of his case, the Mezopotamya News Agency reported.
The Diyarbakır 9th High Criminal Court on Thursday convicted Altan of “disseminating terrorist propaganda,” citing his social media posts as evidence.
The court had previously handed down the same sentence to Altan on July 13, 2018, but the Diyarbakır Regional Court of Justice later overturned the ruling, finding that it violated his right to freedom of expression.
Altan denied the accusations during the hearing, saying his posts were news content and were not intended as propaganda.
Altan was separately arrested in June 2022 along with 16 other journalists in a different investigation on accusations of “membership in a terrorist organization” and “disseminating terrorist propaganda.” Altan and 14 others were released pending trial by the Diyarbakır 4th High Criminal Court in July 2023. The next hearing in that case scheduled for April 9.
Turkey frequently brings terrorism-related charges against journalists and media workers, most commonly alleging links to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has waged a decades-long insurgency against the Turkish state and is designated as a terrorist organization by Turkey and its Western allies.
Press freedom and human rights groups say such cases often rely on reporting activity, sources or published content rather than evidence of involvement in violence and are used to deter critical coverage of the Kurdish issue.
The Kurdish issue, a term prevalent in Turkey’s public discourse, refers to the demand for equal rights by the country’s Kurdish population and their struggle for recognition.
According to Expression Interrupted, a press freedom monitoring group, 28 journalists are currently behind bars in Turkey. The country’s deteriorating media landscape was further pointed out in the 2025 World Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders (RSF), where it was ranked 159th out of 180 nations.
