Hardly nine months to the June 18, 2023 parliamentary and presidential polls in Turkey, could the country’s little remaining breathing space for the electorate source of information, the social media and internet, be heading to a ‘mechanical respiratory political system’ popular among healthcare providers after the ICU acronym for the Intensive Care Unit?
On October 8, 2022, the Turkish Grand National Assembly sitting at Ankara’s Ulrus Square received a bill seeking to force social media networks and internet sites to hand over details of users suspected of “propagating misleading information” for which an up to three-year jail terms were also being sought.
This is something one should have seen coming in the situation where Turkey’s strongman President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is facing the toughest time of his almost two decades’ rule and is being haunted by an assortment of socio, political and ethical malpractices on many fronts. He already had also hinted on it about five months back in May.
On top of that, in its “Freedom in the World 2022” index issued in February, the Freedom House classified the Republic of Turkey as “not free”. The landscape was, and still is, such that more than 90 percent of the country’s media houses, along the no-other-choice storyline of a piper, have to play the tune of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) payer as dictated through Erdogan’s government public tender placements. The report said Erdogan continues to “dominate Turkish politics, a deepening economic crisis and opportunities to further consolidate political power have given the government new incentives to suppress dissent and limit public discourse.”
This is why and how, as a constitutional matters advisory body of the Council of Europe, the Venice Commission issued what has been termed as an “urgent joint opinion” with the Human Rights and Rule of Law Directorate General calling for Turkey’s restraint from passing the proposed bill into law, amending the country’s Penal Code relating to “false information”.
