The Turkish legislation exposes the history professor to a steady fear of being prosecuted because of his opinions on the events of 1915 concerning the Armenian population, hence limiting his freedom of expression under art.10 of ECHR. This is what the European Court of Human Rights established in its judgement of October 25, calling attention once again to the degree of protection of the fundamental liberties in Turkey.
Altug Taner Akçam, a German-Turkish living in Ankara, during the years have done many researches and published several articles on what happened to Ottoman empire’s Armenians in 1915. However, the Turkish Republic, does not recognize the application of the term ‘genocide’ to those events, and some fringes of the population, mainly the radical and ultra-nationalist groups, deemed that the expression denigrates the ‘turkishness’, a crime punished up to three years imprisonment, in compliance with art. 301 of the national penal code.
In October 2006, in an editorial published on the Turkish-Armenians daily newspaper AGOS, Mr Taner Akçam harshly criticized the criminal proceeding set up against his compatriot and journalist Hrant Dink, for injuring the ‘turkishness’ with his articles. The editorial engendered outrage among the extremists that reacted denouncing the author, who had not been condemned under art. 301.
Nonetheless, the history professor decided to turn to the Strasbourg Court, claiming that the penal charges lead off to repeated attacks against him: the media called him ‘German spy’ or ‘traitor’, he received letters full of insults and death threats; fear and anxiety caused by these happenings led him to interrupt his working on Armenians in June 2007.
Last October, the Court recognized that, though the modifications done in recent years, the provisions embodied in article 301 of the Turkish law are extremely vague and do not allow individuals to regulate their behaviour or forecast the consequences of their actions. As a result, the Court affirms, art. 301 constitutes a permanent threat to the freedom of expression protected by the ECHR.
In the past, proceedings on the basis of this article were set up against internationally renowned authors, such as Orhan Pamuk and Elif Şafak; in the first case, the Minister of Justice did not grant the certificate of action, while in the second, the penal Court of Beyoğlu concluded that the novel ‘Istanbul bastards’ was based on fictional events and for this reason the declarations of its main characters could not be deemed as insults to ‘turkishness’.
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