An intensive, nearly year-long effort by the Committee to Protect Journalists to gain the release of imprisoned CPJ International Press Freedom Award winner Ocak Isik Yurtçu, a prominent Turkish editor, and other imprisoned Turkish journalists resulted in an amnesty law, passed by Turkey’s parliament, that freed six newspaper editors, including Yurtçu.
An intensive, nearly year-long effort by the Committee to Protect Journalists to gain the release of imprisoned CPJ International Press Freedom Award winner Ocak Isik Yurtçu, a prominent Turkish editor, and other imprisoned Turkish journalists resulted in an amnesty law, passed by Turkey’s parliament, that freed six newspaper editors, including Yurtçu.
An intensive, nearly year-long effort by the Committee to Protect Journalists to gain the release of imprisoned CPJ International Press Freedom Award winner Ocak Isik Yurtçu, a prominent Turkish editor, and other imprisoned Turkish journalists resulted in an amnesty law, passed by Turkey’s parliament, that freed six newspaper editors, including Yurtçu.
Ocak Isik Yurtçu had little to celebrate last July 24, Journalists Day in Turkey. “Nobody in the world has been sentenced to so many years in prison for articles others have written,” he said from his jail cell in an interview with the daily Yeni Yuzyil. Yurtçu, former editor in chief of the now-defunct daily…
The Committee to Protect Journalists sent an emergency mission to Turkey in July 1997 to press for the release of imprisoned Turkish journalists. CPJ Vice Chairman Terry Anderson led the delegation to support Turkish journalists’ growing condemnation of press freedom violations in their country.
For some delegates, just getting to the West African Journalists Association (WAJA) regional conference in Dakar, Senegal, was an impressive achievement. While his colleagues used more conventional modes of transportation, Sierra Leone Association of Journalists (SLAJ) president Frank Kposowa navigated his way out of the country by night in a hired motorized dugout canoe. The…
Executive Director William A. Orme, Jr., who was interviewed on CNN International, Fox News “In Depth,” MSNBC “Online,” and numerous radio shows about Attacks on the Press in 1997, traveled to California for the April 6 launch of the book at a program at the Freedom Forum in San Francisco. He also addressed the regional conference…
In his first day in office last July, Mesut Yilmaz, Turkey’s prime minister, met with an international delegation led by CPJ and pledged to end the jailing of journalists in his country. Seven months later, representatives of CPJ and the Press Council of Turkey revisited Yilmaz, urging him to fulfill his promise to reform the…