2023-11-03 15:20:28
In front of the capital’s courthouse, Gökçer Tahincioğlu, representative of the T24 information site in Ankara, assured on Wednesday: “ Tolga Şardan worked as a journalist under all successive governments. He was acquitted in all the cases for which he was tried. It will be the same for this affair, and he will continue to write”.
A specialist in difficult investigations, Tolga Şardan has once again dipped her pen into a sensitive matter. In an article titled “ What is in the MIT report (Turkish intelligence services, editor’s note) on justice submitted to the presidency », published Tuesday October 31, the investigative journalist presented elements on the alleged corruption networks within the judicial system between judges, lawyers and prosecutors.
Based on information from the report to which he had access, he explained how the networks would have developed particularly in the Bakirköy and Caglayan courthouses (European side of Istanbul, editor’s note). People prosecuted in legal investigations would be domiciled nearby in order to be judged there and to be able to influence the course of the proceedings through financial means.
Denial of power
On its X account (formerly Twitter), the Center for the Fight against Disinformation linked to the Presidential Communications Department quickly denied the information: “ Contrary to what has been claimed, there is no intelligence report on the issue “. The Istanbul public prosecutor launched proceedings against the journalist, who was subsequently arrested at his home in Ankara, accused of “dissemination of misleading information to the public ».
A journalist for 35 years, Tolga Sardan is a specialist in police/justice issues and her column on T24 “ Magnifying glass » (On the Loup) is particularly followed in the profession. Since the replacement of the Minister of the Interior, Süleyman Soylu, by the former governor of Istanbul, Ali Yerlikaya, he has documented the “cleansing” of the police institution every week. The series of the Ayhan Bora Kaplan affair broadcast this summer revealed the links between police officers and Ankara mafia networks close to former minister Süleyman Soylu.
Convinced of the political dimension of this arrest, dozens of journalists gathered Thursday, November 2 in front of the T24 offices, in the center of Ankara, in solidarity with their colleagues. The use of the law known as “ fight against disinformation » particularly worries the profession. Voted in October 2022, it provides for up to three years in prison for the dissemination of information considered “misleading” and was at the time denounced as a “censorship law” by the opposition.
Muzzled press
The imprisonment of Tolga Sardan was widely interpreted as a warning from the authorities to the attention of investigative journalists working in particular on the activities of the intelligence services (MIT). Ranked 165th out of 180 in the RSF ranking (Reporter sans Frontières) on press freedom, Turkey has regularly been denounced by the NGO as the “largest prison in the world for journalists”.
In recent years, several journalists who worked at MIT have been prosecuted by the courts, such as the former editor-in-chief of the daily Republic, Can Dundar, for an article published on arms transfers from Turkey to jihadist groups in Syria. Journalist Baris Pehlivan was also imprisoned for disseminating classified information on the death of an MIT member in Libya.
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