Turkey Revamping Speech Laws

I'm going to start putting up new photo posts this weekend, but first one more update: The New York Times reports on the good news that Turkey is taking steps to weaken speech laws that make it illegal to criticize Ataturk and the formation of the modern nation. This is one of the biggest obstacles towards its joining the EU.

When Atilla Yayla, a maverick political science professor, offered a mild criticism of Turkey’s first years as a country, his remarks unleashed a torrent of abuse.

“Traitor!” a newspaper headline shouted. His college dismissed him. State prosecutors in this western city, where he spoke, opened a criminal case against him. His crime? Violating an obscure law against insulting the legacy of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Turkey’s founder.

“I need thoughts to counter my ideas,” Mr. Yayla said. “Instead they attacked me.”

Turkey’s government has taken on the issue of free speech and is expected as early as Friday to announce a weakening of a law against insulting Turkishness, an amendment that is considered a key measure of the democratic maturity of this Muslim country as it tries to gain acceptance to the European Union.

But while that law, called Article 301, is known to many in the West — Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel Prize-winning Turkish novelist, was prosecuted under 301 — it is just one of many laws that limit freedom of expression for intellectuals in Turkey. The law under which Mr. Yayla was prosecuted, for example, dates from 1951 and is not even part of the penal code.

[...]

Mr. Yayla, for his part, said he was simply trying to provoke a thoughtful discussion on the monopoly of political symbols.

“Of course we need to have Ataturk statues, but there are other people in Turkish history, and they deserve statues, too,” he said by telephone.