Eight press freedom and rights organizations on Friday called on Turkish authorities to immediately release freelance journalist Tuğba Tekerek, who is being held in pretrial detention after a report she wrote about LGBT issues in Georgia became part of an obscenity investigation, the Media and Law Studies Association (MLSA) reported.
The groups said in a joint statement that Tekerek’s case and a series of restrictions on news websites and journalists’ social media accounts raised concerns that journalistic activity was being targeted as part of a larger crackdown on LGBT organizations and activists. They also called for the access restrictions to be lifted and for authorities to disclose the content and legal grounds underlying the investigations.
Police detained Tekerek at her home in Istanbul late on September 13 and transferred her to Ankara, where a court put her in pretrial detention two days later as part of an investigation into alleged obscenity involving Kaos GL.
Prosecutors alleged that some of Kaos GL’s social media posts contained sexually explicit physical contact and other material that violated public morality and also claimed that Tekerek was an administrator of the organization’s Instagram account.
Tekerek denied managing the account, saying her only connection to Kaos GL was a freelance article she wrote in 2024 about LGBT people in Georgia, which the organization later promoted on Instagram.
According to police interrogation records and the court order reviewed by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), authorities alleged that Tekerek administered Kaos GL’s Instagram account. Tekerek denied the allegation, saying she had never been a member, employee or volunteer of the organization and had no role in managing its social media accounts.
Tekerek said she traveled to Georgia in 2024 with a group of international journalists to cover elections and interviewed representatives of political parties, media outlets and civil society organizations. She later wrote reports for several outlets, including an article for Kaos GL about the LGBT community in Georgia.
After Kaos GL published the article, its editors promoted it on the organization’s Instagram account, identifying it as Tekerek’s reporting, she said.
“My connection with the Kaos GL Instagram account consists of this,” Tekerek wrote in a letter from Sincan Prison in Ankara, where she is being held.
Tekerek was detained during a nationwide series of raids that began early on September 13 and targeted LGBT and HIV rights organizations, activists and businesses in several provinces. Justice Minister Akın Gürlek said the investigations covered 162 people, nine associations and 13 businesses, a figure referring to the scope of the investigations rather than the number of people detained.
Authorities have said the investigations concern allegations including obscenity and other criminal offenses and described the operations as intended to protect children, the institution of the family and public order. Rights organizations have rejected that justification and accused the government of using criminal investigations to suppress LGBT advocacy.
The crackdown has also included restrictions on websites and social media accounts. A September 12 order by Istanbul’s 7th Criminal Court of Peace blocked access to websites belonging to LGBT organizations and news outlets, including Kaos GL and Velvele, as well as social media accounts belonging to activists, journalists and rights defenders.
Additional court orders over the following days targeted accounts belonging to news organizations and civil society groups, including the Evrensel newspaper, Amnesty International Turkey, Academics for Peace and the MLSA.
The September 18 statement was signed by MLSA, the Progressive Journalists Association, PEN Norway, the Dicle Fırat Journalists Association, the International Press Institute, the Norwegian Helsinki Committee, the Journalists’ Union of Turkey and the Platform for Independent Journalism (P24).
The groups said the authorities should release people deprived of their liberty because of journalistic activity, remove restrictions on news outlets and journalists’ accounts and safeguard confidential information about journalists’ sources contained on devices seized during the raids.
