Pro-Kurdish JİNHA (Jin News Agency) correspondent Aysel Işık, who was arrested in November 2016, has been released after a trial in the Şırnak 2nd High Criminal Court on Thursday.
Işık, who was being held in the Urfa Type T Closed Prison, joined the hearing via a video conference. Işık pleaded: “I am a journalist. My reporting and my social media posts are only informative. The work I do serves no other purpose”. The court decided to release Işık after her hearing.
On November 21, 2016, Işık was arrested on the charge of “being a member of an [illegal] organization” due to her social media posts. On October 29, 2016 JİNHA was closed by a statutory decree, issued by AKP government under the State of Emergency.
Stockholm Center for Freedom, an advocacy group that monitors rights violations in Turkey, issued a report on Wednesday, saying that the number of jailed journalist has reached to a new record of 200 with Germany’s Die Welt, Deniz Yücel being among new arrestees.
Of these journalists, 179 are arrested pending trial and without a conviction. Most of the journalists do not even know what the charges are or what evidence, if any, the government has because the indictments were not filed yet.
March 2, 2017
