Vedat Demir | |
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| Born | April 5,1966 (age 56–57) |
| Nationality | Turkish |
| Occupation(s) | Academician, writer, journalist |
Vedat Demir (born April 5, 1966) is a professor at the Free University of Berlin. [1] He formerly served as the General Secretary of the Turkish Press Council and was a professor at his alma mater, Istanbul University, before he was targeted and imprisoned by the Turkish government.
Prof. Vedat Demir was born on April 5, 1966, in Sinop, Turkey. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees from Marmara University and his PhD from Istanbul University, where he taught political communication, media ethics and policy making between 2010 and 2016. He was a visiting scholar of Communications at Ithaca College and Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York, between 2012 and 2014. [2]
Demir formerly served as General Secretary of the Turkish Press Council from 2000 to 2003. As the former General Secretary of the Turkish Press Council, he has defended freedom of the press in Turkey throughout his academic and journalistic career. [3] His scholarship focuses on the role of media in democracy and shaping public opinion. He is the author of The Ethics of Media (2006), The Relationship Between Media and Politics in Turkey (2007), and Public Diplomacy and Soft Power (2012).
Demir has been an outspoken critic of the recent authoritarianism of the Turkish government, using his newspaper columns and television appearances to affirm democratic values, human rights, and rule of law. [4]
In 2015, a group of Turkish intellectuals, including Prof. Demir, started a petition campaign titled “Silence the Guns” calling for a reconciliation between the Turkish government and the Kurdish militants to end the ongoing civil war in Eastern Turkey. [5]
As a reaction to the government's seizure of critical newspapers and television stations in Turkey, Demir raised his voice in defense of press freedom and started writing at Yarına Bakış. [6] In his columns he has also been a fierce defender of academic freedom.
On July 20, 2016, Professor Demir along with 95 colleagues at Istanbul University, were suspended from their academic positions. [7]
In retaliation for his expression of academic opinions and journalistic activities, on July 24, Turkish police took Demir into custody, searched both house and office, and detained him without stating charges. [8] During this period he was denied contact with his lawyer and family members. [9] On August 3, he was formally arrested and jailed on suspicions of being involved in the movement behind the coup d'état attempt in Turkey. [10] Demir has denied involvement in the movement, [11] and publicly denounced the July 15 coup attempt in his column. [12] [13] As the State Department noted in its 2016 human rights report, thousands of Turkish academics and journalists were arrested after the attempted coup with fabricated evidence and little clarity on the charges. [14] On September 1, 2016, Demir was formally dismissed from his duties at Istanbul University with a state of emergency decree that sacked thousands of academics in Turkish universities. [15]
Seven months after his arrest, Prof. Demir was released from prison under judicial supervision with 5 other academics on February 14, 2017. [16]
Cumhuriyet is the oldest up-market Turkish daily newspaper. It has been described as "the most important independent public interest newspaper in contemporary Turkey". The newspaper was awarded the Freedom of Press Prize by Reporters Without Borders in 2015 and the Alternative Nobel Prize in 2016. It is considered Turkey's newspaper of record. It has been known for its stance of publishing anti-Islamist titles and news at least since the 1960s.
Can Dündar is a Turkish journalist, columnist and documentarian. Editor-in-chief of center-left Cumhuriyet newspaper until August 2016, he was arrested in November 2015 after his newspaper published footage showing the State Intelligence MİT sending weapons to Syrian Islamist fighters.
Censorship in Turkey is regulated by domestic and international legislation, the latter taking precedence over domestic law, according to Article 90 of the Constitution of Turkey.
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Nokta was a leading Turkish weekly political news magazine. Founded in 1983, it was closed down by its owner in 2007 under military pressure after revealing several coup plots. Revived in 2015, it was closed again in the course of the 2016–17 Turkish purges.
Çetin Özek was a prominent Turkish university professor of criminal law, jurist, author and journalist.
İştar Gözaydın is a professor of Law and Politics. She is also a founder of the Helsinki Citizens Assembly, a human rights organization in Turkey. She was a research fellow at the University of London, Birkbeck College Birkbeck, University of London in 2009 and she was a Fulbright Program scholar in the U.S. in 1986-87.
Operation Sledgehammer is the name of an alleged Turkish secularist military coup plan dating back to 2003, in response to the Justice and Development Party (AKP) gaining office.
Mehmet Vedat Tek (1873–1942) was a Turkish architect who was one of the leading figures of the First Turkish National Architectural Movement.
Ahmet Şık is a Turkish investigative journalist, the author of several books, a trade unionist, and member of Parliament in Turkey. His book, The Imam's Army, investigating the controversial Gülen movement of the Islamic preacher Fethullah Gülen, led to his detention for a year in 2011–2012 and the book's being seized and banned. He was under indictment in the OdaTV case of the Ergenekon trials; his cause has been taken up by English PEN, an association of writers fighting for freedom of expression. In 2016, the prosecutor in this case requested Şık's acquittal. On 29 December 2016, Şık was taken into custody once again on charges of "propaganda of terrorist organisations", with reference to 11 tweets that he had published. The following day, an Istanbul judge ordered Ahmet's arrest. According to lawyers, Şık was denied access to legal advice, held in solitary confinement, and not given drinking water for three days. He ran as an HDP candidate in 2018 Turkish elections and got elected from Istanbul's second electoral district. In 2020, he resigned from HDP, citing political differences and after sitting as an independent for a year, he joined the Workers' Party of Turkey.
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Mehmet Hasan Altan is a Turkish academic economist, journalist, and author of over 25 books. Describing himself as a "Marxist-liberal", he is the originator of the term "Second Republic", arguing that Turkey needs to reconstitute its republic as a true democracy. He is a strong supporter of the Accession of Turkey to the European Union.
Abdülhamit Bilici is a Turkish journalist and media executive. Bilici was once one of the prominent and influential media figures in Turkey, as the last editor-in-chief of Zaman, the country’s most widely circulated newspaper and the CEO of the Feza Publications which ranked 244th among top 500 companies according to Istanbul Chamber of Industry's ISO500. Prior to that, he was the general director of Cihan News Agency, once the nation’s second largest news agency and also columnist of both Zaman daily and its English-language version, Today's Zaman. Bilici's newspapers were taken over by Erdogan government with a brutal raid on March 5, 2016 and the Feza Media Group was shutdown after July 15, failed coup attempt. In these circumstances, he was forced into exile under the threat of an arrest warrant.
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The 2016–present purges in Turkey are a series of purges by the Government of Turkey enabled by a state of emergency in reaction to the 15 July failed coup d'état. The purges began with the arrest of Turkish Armed Forces personnel reportedly linked to the coup attempt but arrests were expanded to include other elements of the Turkish military, as well as civil servants and private citizens. These later actions reflected a power struggle between secularist and Islamist political elites in Turkey, affected people who were not active in nor aware of the coup, but who the government claimed were connected with the Gülen movement, an opposition group which the government blamed for the coup. Possession of books authored by Gülen was considered valid evidence of such a connection and cause for arrest.
Turkey's media purge after the failed coup d'état on July 15, 2016 resulted in the shutdown of at least 131 media outlets and the arrest of 117 journalists – at least 35 of whom have been indicted for "membership in a terror group".
Vedat Şar is a Turkish psychiatrist and professor who specialises in psychological trauma and dissociative disorder. His work is particularly concerned with childhood trauma, the epidemiology of dissociative disorders, complex posttraumatic stress disorder, borderline personality disorder, and treatment with EMDR.
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Ahmet Rona Serozan was a Turkish jurist, university professor of civil law, lawyer and writer.
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