Turkish journalists facing jail time for reprinting Charlie Hebdo cover
A Turkish prosecutor has accused two journalists of "insulting people's religious values" after they reprinted a Charlie Hebdo cover featuring a caricature of the Prophet Mohammed.
On Wednesday, the daily newspaper Cumhuriyet announced that columnists Ceyda Karan and Hikmet Cetinkaya face jail terms of four-and-a-half years. "We are being threatened with prison for defending free speech," Karan told Reuters. "Neither of us will abandon our defense of free speech." The secular paper received threats after it printed the caricature in solidarity following the Jan. 7 attacks on the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris, and Karan has had a bodyguard ever since.
The prosecutor began investigating the journalists after Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu accused the newspaper of "incitement." Turkey's penal code makes it a crime to insult religion.
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Catherine Garcia is night editor for TheWeek.com. Her writing and reporting has appeared in Entertainment Weekly and EW.com, The New York Times, The Book of Jezebel, and other publications. A Southern California native, Catherine is a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
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