A court in Turkey has ordered the state to pay TL 25,000 ($755) in damages to Sibel Tekin, a documentary filmmaker and journalist who was imprisoned for 44 days due to her filming of a police checkpoint and prison transport vehicle for a documentary, the Bianet news website reported on Friday.
The ruling came after Tekin’s lawyers, Mehtap Sakinci and Hümeyra Taşkıran, had filed a claim following her acquittal in 2023, seeking TL 10,000 ($302) in material damages and TL 250,000 ($7,558) in non-pecuniary damages, highlighting the significant emotional and psychological distress Tekin and her family endured during the 18-month legal process.
The lawyers argued in the filing, “Neither Sibel Tekin nor her family can be adequately compensated for the injustice they have suffered. An innocent person was wrongfully detained and imprisoned, denied the right to presumption of innocence and subjected to a rushed and ineffective investigation, causing severe emotional distress.”
The Ankara 25th High Criminal Court denied the claim for material damages, citing insufficient grounds, while acknowledging the wrongful detention and imprisonment and ordered compensation for the period during which she was unlawfully detained and imprisoned.
Tekin was detained on December 15, 2022 in Ankara while filming people going to work in the dark due to Turkey’s permanent implementation of daylight saving time. Her home was subsequently raided, and she was taken into custody on December 16. On December 17, she was formally arrested and sent to Sincan Prison.
The indictment, filed 16 days after Tekin’s arrest, alleged that she had connections to organized crime but did not provide names. Tekin was charged with “membership in an armed organization.”
The prosecutor criticized Tekin’s nighttime footage, arguing that “a video recording where people, vehicles and buildings are not clearly visible is not consistent with the work of a professional documentary filmmaker.” Tekin was tried at the Ankara 26th High Criminal Court, released on January 30, 2023 and acquitted on March 5, 2023.
Tekin has famously shot documentaries on a wide range of events and protests that challenge the narrative of the Turkish government, such as twin bombings in Ankara in 2015 by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) that claimed the lives of 103 people; the anti-government Gezi Park protests of 2013; and a historic strike launched by the Tekel tobacco workers in Turkey in 2009 following the company’s privatization.
Rights groups routinely accuse Turkey of undermining media freedom by arresting journalists and shutting down critical media outlets, especially since President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan survived a coup attempt in July 2016.
Turkey, which has been suffering from a poor record of freedom of the press for years, ranks 158th among 180 countries in RSF’s World Press Freedom Index published on May 3 on the occasion of World Press Freedom Day.
