Turkey’s Constitutional Court has found “public benefit” in a 2019 report by the sendika.org news website concerning an award Turkey’s public broadcaster had received from the terrorism-linked “Syrian Salvation Government” (SSG), Turkish Minute reported, citing the Sendika.org news website.
The SSG was formed in 2017 under the initiative of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the al-Qaeda offshoot that is dominant in Syria’s Idlib province, in the context of the Syrian civil war.
The Sendika.org news website reported on the award the Turkish Radio and Television Corporation (TRT) received from the SSG in 2019, a move that resulted in a lawsuit filed by TRT against the website.
After the court of first instance rejected the lawsuit, concluding that sendika.org’s news article was within the limits of criticism and did not constitute an attack on the rights of TRT, the broadcaster appealed the decision. The regional appeals court upheld TRT’s claim of rights violation, saying the news report “creates the perception that TRT is associated with a terrorist organization” and ordered the website to pay TRT TL 20,000 ($606) in non-pecuniary damages.
The website administrators then took the case to the top court, which overturned the regional court’s decision and emphasized in its ruling that sendika.org’s news article was not based on false information or interpretation but was a news item for the benefit of the public.
“There is no dispute regarding the fact that the plaintiff was awarded by the HTS. Undoubtedly, it is a current issue of public interest and news value for an official broadcaster of the country to receive an award from an organization whose assets have been frozen [over terrorism links],” the court said.
The top court ruled that TRT pay the sendika.org administrators TL 30,000 ($909) in non-pecuniary damages for violating press freedom.
Rights groups routinely accuse Turkey of undermining media freedom, especially since President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan survived a failed coup in July 2016.
After the failed coup, the Turkish government summarily shut down nearly 200 media outlets due to their alleged links to terrorism or their alleged involvement in terrorist propaganda, detaining dozens of journalists, which briefly made Turkey the second-worst jailer of journalists in the world after China.
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 the World Press Freedom Day.
