April 2016

Claim: Cumhuriyet says its journalists sentenced for blasphemy

2016-04-29 01:22 BST
Posted in:
Domestic Politics
English

On 28 April 2016, Reuters correspondent Ece Toksabay wrote a news article about the jail sentence passed to two journalists of Cumhuriyet daily.

Toksabay claimed that “A Turkish court sentenced two journalists to two years in jail for blasphemy on Thursday, their newspaper said, after they reprinted a controversial cover from the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo above their columns last year.”

Claim: Turkey’s parliament speaker drafts constitution

2016-04-28 09:49 BST
Posted in:
Domestic Politics
English

On 27 April 2016, The Independent released a news story about Turkey’s parliament speaker Ismail Kahraman’s comments on the issue of secularism in the new constitution.

The story mentioned that “Speaker Ismail Kahraman, who is drafting the new charter, also said the new constitution should drop references to secularism, while lamenting the fact Allah is not mentioned in the constitution.”

The Night Manager’s inaccurate depiction of refugee camps in Turkey

2016-04-21 09:17 BST
Posted in:
Refugees
English
On 20 March 2016, the Night Manager, British-American television series, portrayed refugee camps in Turkey were as tents along a wayside with poor conditions. 
 
In the beginning of the 5th episode of the Night Manager, Onslow Roper (Hugh Laurie) and Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston) arrive by plane in  Kasimli, a fictional city in southeastern Turkey and close to the Syrian border. Refugees are depicted as deprived of basic needs and looking for visitors’ aid.
 

HDP co-chair Selahattin Demirtas repeats false claims in NYT

2016-04-17 08:46 BST
Posted in:
Kurdish Issue
English

Turkey’s Peoples' Democratic Party’s (HDP) co-chair Selahattin Demirtas penned an article for The New York Times in which he claimed that the HDP’s gaining of 13 percent in June 2015’s general election negatively affected the peace process between the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the Turkish government, that Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan wants to change the Constitution “to expand his powers”, and that “besieged towns” in Turkey’s majority-

Claim: Erdogan’s Turkey ignores minority rights

2016-04-11 11:56 BST
Posted in:
Social Issues
English

On 6 April 2016, Huffington Post’s Yascha Mounk published an article in which it was claimed that Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan “desires to transform Turkey into a place where individual rights might often be ignored.”

According to Mounk, Erdogan intends to make Turkey a country in which only the voice of the majority “really does reign supreme” while minorities are not taken seriously.1

Claim: Turkey expels Syrian refugees

2016-04-07 07:32 BST
Posted in:
Refugees
English
On 1 April 2016, Amnesty International published an article on its website about last month’s EU – Turkey agreement on refugees, in which it is stipulated that Turkey will receive Syrian refugees from Greece and the EU will take Syrian refugees from Turkey for the each Syrian refugee returned.1 In the article it is claimed that Turkey is not a safe country for the refugees

Claim: AK Party government houses refugees in opposition towns

2016-04-06 01:27 BST
Posted in:
Refugees
English

On 6 March 2016, Alev Scott wrote an article, which was published in Politico, in which she cited the claim that Turkey's ruling AK Party is “housing refugees in towns that vote for its rivals”. It is also implied that refugees are not housed in conservative towns in Anatolia with strong support for the ruling party.1

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