Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been named among the world’s “press freedom predators” by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) for the fourth time, with the organization citing the prosecution and imprisonment of journalists as examples of systematic judicial harassment.
The 2026 list, released on November 2, identified 33 individuals and entities across five categories: political, security, legal, economic and social. Erdoğan was put in the “legal” category, which covers the use of judicial proceedings to target journalists. He was previously included in the list in 2016, 2021 and 2025.
In its profile of Erdoğan, RSF cited the pretrial detention of İsmail Arı, an investigative reporter for the BirGün daily who was jailed on October 21 on disinformation charges, and freelance journalist Tuğba Tekerek, jailed on September 15 over a 2024 article published by the LGBTQ+ rights organization Kaos GL.
Arı remains in prison, with prosecutors seeking a sentence of more than five years over his social media posts. The Media and Law Studies Association (MLSA) applied to Turkey’s Constitutional Court on October 13, seeking Tekerek’s release from pretrial detention.
RSF also cited the nearly three-month pretrial detention of Deutsche Welle journalist Alican Uludağ on charges including insulting the president and the imprisonment of journalist Yelis Ayaz from May 15 to June 1 over her reporting on allegations that the son of a ruling party lawmaker brought weapons to school. Both journalists were subsequently released, but their prosecutions continued.
According to RSF, more than 250 journalists have been prosecuted for insulting the president since Erdoğan took office in 2014, an offense the organization identified as his principal tool for suppressing journalism.
The profile also quoted Erdoğan’s remarks on March 17, when he said Turkey was “waging a war for truth on all fronts” and urged media outlets to “take more initiative and to be more active and effective.”
Other figures on the 2026 list included US President Donald Trump, who was named for the first time this year, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, Azerbaijani President İlham Aliyev, Argentine President Javier Milei and Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
According to Expression Interrupted, a press freedom monitoring group, 27 journalists are currently behind bars in Turkey. The country’s deteriorating media landscape was further pointed out in the 2026 World Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders (RSF), where it was ranked 163rd out of 180 nations.
