Another prosecution against Agos journalists

24 January 2008
Reporters without borders (press release), France

Reporters Without Borders condemns the charges that have been brought against the owner of the Armenian-Turkish newspaper Agos, Serkis Seropyan, and its new editor, Aris Nalci, because of a 9 November editorial criticising the one-year suspended prison sentences passed the previous month on Seropyan, former editor Arat Dink, and two other journalists, Aydin Engin and Karin Karakashli.

According to a press report on 16 January, Seropyan and Nalci were summoned by an Istanbul prosecutor and ordered to pay a fine of 23,500 euros because of the editorial. When they refused, the prosecutor said they would be tried for “attempted obstruction of justice” under article 288 of the criminal code, which carries a maximum penalty of four a half years in prison. Reporters Without Borders regards this prosecution as yet another case of improper use of the press law.

The one-year suspended sentence was imposed on the four journalists for reprinting an interview that Dink’s father, then Agos editor Hrant Dink, gave to Reuters in 2006 in which he said the massacres of Armenians from 1915 to 1917 constituted genocide. Hrant Dink was murdered in January 2007.

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