A Turkish court has ordered the arrest of three more people as part of an ongoing investigation targeting the left-wing Socialist Party of the Oppressed (ESP), bringing the total number of arrests in the crackdown to 80, Turkish media reported.
The latest arrests were ordered by the İstanbul 7th Criminal Magistrate of Peace, which on Thursday sent Hüseyin Gültepe, a representative of the left-wing Ceylan Publishing, to pretrial detention. A day earlier, the same court had ordered the arrest of two ESP members, Onur Yoldaş Mete and İbrahim Halil Doğan.
The arrests are part of a broader crackdown that began with police raids on February 3 across 23 provinces. Of those initially detained, 47 were arrested on February 5, with another 30 arrested on February 6.
Seventeen publishing houses issued a joint statement condemning the arrest of Ceylan Publishing employees, denouncing what they described as the criminalization of books and publishing. The signatories called for an end to increasing restrictions on freedom of thought and expression.
Prior to Gültepe’s arrest, another Ceylan Publishing employee, Sonnur Sağlamer, had been jailed, while company owner Hüsnü Fuat Uygur was put under house arrest as part of the same investigation.
Tülay Hatimoğulları, co-chair of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Equality and Democracy (DEM Party) visited ESP headquarters, along with the co-chairs of the pro-Kurdish Democratic Regions Party (DBP) and representatives from the People’s Democratic Congress (HDK) in a show of solidarity.
Hatimoğulları said they would continue to stand against what she described as a regime that denies people their right to political participation and uses the judiciary as a tool of intimidation against opposition groups.
