International Herald Tribune, France
Feb 16 2007
Turkish aide foresees revisions to Article 301
By Dan Bilefsky Published: February 16, 2007
BRUSSELS: Turkey plans to revise a controversial law that makes
insulting Turkishness a crime by the end of this year, according to
the country’s chief European Union negotiator.
The law – Article 301 of the Turkish penal code – has resulted in
prosecutions against leading Turkish intellectuals, including Orhan
Pamuk, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature last year, and
Hrant Dink, an Armenian-Turkish journalist who was killed in January
in Istanbul.
Ali Babacan, a leading member of the governing Justice and
Development Party, a minister in the cabinet and the country’s EU
negotiator, said Thursday that the law was harming Turkey.
Asked if the government would abandon the law, he said, "That is not
going to happen. Article 301 will stay." But he added that the
government was looking at ways to change the way the law was being
implemented and said his hope was that it could be altered before
elections in November.
Turkish analysts said such a change would most likely entail
narrowing the legal definition of what constitutes an insult to
Turkishness and amending the law.
"As a government, we have indicated we are not happy with what is
going on in Turkey with regard to that law," Babacan said. "When
novelists, columnists and Nobel Prize winners go back and forth from
the courtroom, this is not good for Turkey."
The European Commission, the European Union’s executive branch, has
been particularly concerned about the law, which attracted global
criticism last year when Pamuk was put on trial for telling a Swiss
newspaper that more than a million Armenians were massacred by
Ottoman Turks during World War I. Critics of the law also say that it
contributed to a nationalistic political climate in Turkey that led
to the murder of Dink, an outspoken proponent of free speech who had
criticized the law.
Babacan said the intensifying animosity toward Turkey in Europe was
making headlines at home and risked spurring an anti-EU backlash.
"There has been severe damage to the credibility of the EU process in
Turkish eyes," he said.