A Turkish court has acquitted two Vice News journalists of terrorism-related charges after a nine-year trial stemming from their reporting in Turkey’s restive southeast in 2015, Turkish Minute reported Monday.
The Diyarbakır 8th Criminal Court ruled in favor of Vice News reporter Jake Hanrahan and cameraman Philip Pendlebury, both British citizens, despite a prosecutor’s request for their conviction at the 22nd hearing of their trial on Monday. The two were detained in September 2015 while covering clashes between the Turkish military and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
Hanrahan and Pendlebury were in the region to film a documentary at a time when allegations of excessive police violence, civilian deaths and mistreatment of detainees were widespread. They were deported on September 3, 2015 after spending a week in pretrial detention in a prison in Adana, southern Turkey.
Tried in absentia, the journalists were represented by their lawyer, Törehan Büyüksoy. They faced charges of membership in a terrorist organization by aiding it, violating terrorism financing laws and spreading terrorist propaganda — offenses carrying potential prison sentences of between 15 and 67 years.
Prosecutors cited money found on them, footage they recorded and notes from their reporting as evidence. The indictment did not specify which group they were accused of aiding, though journalists in Turkey’s Kurdish-majority southeast often face PKK-related allegations. In 2015 an anonymous witness also claimed Hanrahan and Pendlebury were linked to the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group, a charge their former lawyer, Ahmet Ay, called “completely baseless.”
Their detention and prosecution sparked outrage among journalists and human rights organizations. The conflict between the Turkish military and the PKK reignited in 2015 after the collapse of a ceasefire brokered in 2012. At the time, Turkish media coverage of the conflict was limited due to government restrictions.
Turkey, which suffers from a poor press freedom record, was ranked 158th out of 180 countries in the 2024 World Press Freedom Index by Reporters without Borders.
