The Centre for Turkey Studies (CEFTUS) is pleased to invite you to a public forum with renowned journalist Yavuz Baydar, co-founder of P24, the Platform for Independent Media, and Editor-in-Chief of Ahval online. Baydar has recently been given the Special Award of the European Press Prize, which he shared with the Guardian and Der Spiegel.
This event is kindly hosted and chaired by Virendra Sharma, Labour MP for Ealing, Southall.
Please see speaker biography below.
The event will take place between 7-9PM on Wednesday, 7 February 2018 in Committee Room 10, House of Commons.
Please note that security checks are required to enter House of Commons, we kindly ask you to arrive at 6.30PM, allowing the event to start and end on time.
Turkey is said to have experienced the world’s biggest decline in freedom of speech over the past decade, much of which has taken place since the declaration of state of emergency following the failed coup attempt in July 2016.
According to Freedom House, in 2017 Turkey is now rated ‘partly free’ in freedom in the world, ‘not free’ in freedom of the press, and ‘not free’ in freedom on the net. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reported that 73 journalists were put behind bars in 2017.
As part of ongoing operations following the coup attempt in 2016, many journalists accused of alleged links to the coup plotters and/or terrorist organisations have been put under pretrial detention. Despite Constitutional Court ruling in early January, prominent journalists Mehmet Altan and Sahin Alpay, who had been detained for over a year, were not released. This again brought attention to the role of the judiciary in Turkey, with the lower courts making an unprecedented decision to not recognise a higher court’s decision. The cases of Altan and Alpay, alongside several other detained journalists, will now be taken to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), which is expected to issue a judgement in February.
Our keynote speaker, journalist Yavuz Baydar, will lead a discussion on politics, media and law in Turkey in this timely Westminster Debate on 7th February 2018.
We look forward to welcoming you to this event.
The views of our speakers do not necessarily represent the views of the Centre for Turkey Studies.
Speaker Biography
Yavuz Baydar is the Editor-in-Chief of Ahval, a trilingual independent online news site on Turkey. He has been a journalist for nearly 40 years. Baydar was among the co-founders, in 2013, of the independent media platform P24 to monitor the media sector and the state of journalism in his home country. His opinion articles have appeared in the Guardian, Süddeutsche Zeitung, New York Times, El Pais, Svenska Dagbladet, Yomiuri Shimbun, the Arab Weekly, and Index on Censorship. He wrote regular opinion columns for the Turkish dailies Today’s Zaman, Bugun and Ozgur Dusunce. Turkey’s first news ombudsman, beginning at Milliyet daily in 1999, Baydar worked in the same role as reader representative until 2014.
He served as president of the U.S. based International Organizaton of News Ombudsmen (ONO) in 2003. In 2014, as a Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School of Government, he completed an extensive research paper on self-censorship, corruption of ownership in Turkish media, state oppression and threats over journalism in Turkey – in the wake of Gezi Park protests. Baydar worked as producer and news presenter in Swedish Radio &TV Corp. (SR) Stockholm, Sweden; as correspondent for Scandinavia and Baltics for Turkish daily Cumhuriyet between 1980-1992, and the BBC World Service, in early 1990’s.
Baydar has recently been given the prestigious ‘Journalistenpreis’ by the SüdostEurope Gesellschaft in Germany. Earlier, he was delivered the Special Award of the European Press Prize (EPP), for ‘excellence in journalism’, in 2014, and, in 2017, Morris B Abram Human Rights Award by UN Watch. He was also given the Umbria Journalism Award, Italy, in March 2014, and Caravella ‘Mare Nostrum’ Award, by the organization ‘Journalists of the Mediterranean’, in Puglia, Italy. He has lived outside Turkey since the July 2016 coup attempt.
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