13/11/2023 | Writer: Aslı Alpar
She shared a rainbow flag, and she was accused of “insulting the Turkish flag”.
Photograph: Semra Çelebi
Journalist Semra Çelebi who was on trial claiming “publicly degrading the symbols of State sovereignty” due to sharing a Tweet at the 2020 Pride March and was acquitted last week told KaosGL.org about the trial process.
You shared the expression “even if what makes the flag a real flag is faggots” with a rainbow flag. Then you were subjected to a three-year trial process…
Yes, a process that should never have occurred... In 2020, LGBTI+ organisations started a hashtag study on social media for the Pride march as the pandemic measures continued. I supported this hashtag study with my favorite phrase “even if we are faggots”. You can make dozens of meanings out of this post. But the only meaning that won’t come out is insulting the Turkish flag and martyrs. It was an attempt to establish a context that never even crossed my mind. More precisely, they saw it as an opportunity.
What kind of an opportunity you mean?
When I shared this post, I was the editor-in-chief of Gazete Kadıköy, i.e. an employee of the Kadıköy Municipality, a municipality of the Republican People’s Party. The opportunity was seen by the lawyer Aydoğan Ahıakın, the then Kadıköy AKP district chairman, was both to criminalize the LGBTI+ movement and to target a municipality where it could not be effective. My post had received only a few likes and was shared a few times. However as soon as Ahıakın targeted me, my post became almost viral. Newspapers such as Yeni Akit, Yeni Şafak and Sabah published news about me using headlines such as “The woman who insulted the Turkish flag”. These newspapers were not only targeting me, but also the names on Gazete Kadıköy’s masthead.
And then…
The prosecutor called me to testify. And I told that I had posted the Tweet and I had been working as a journalist for twenty three years. And I said, as a left-leaning person, I had stood by LGBTI+s when they were turned into “object of hatred”, just as I stand in solidarity with all oppressed people. The prosecutor didn’t feel the need to investigate.
The lawsuit brought after the second complaint!
However Ahıakın was not pleased with this decision…
Surely. He makes a criminal complaint once again and objects to the prosecutor’s decision. Although he is a lawyer and knows that the objection wasn’t regular, he objects and adds a document regarding his membership of Justice and Development Party (AKP). This time, three years later, a lawsuit is filed on the grounds that “elements of a crime did not occur”.
How was the trial process?
As soon as the case was filed, the LGBTI+ Commission of the Human Rights Association and the Media and Law Studies Association (MLSA) contacted me and followed the case. Lawyers Jiyan Tosun and Fatih Aydın provided an excellent defense based on human rights. The first hearing of the case, which was filed in December 2022, was scheduled for February 2 at the İstanbul Anatolian 10th Criminal Court of First Instance, but was postponed because the judge was on holiday. The second hearing took place on October 19. I defended my statement to the prosecutor, but the prosecutor claimed that my post reminded the Turkish flag in Mithat Cemal Kuntay’s poem “what makes a flag a real flag is the blood on it, if someone died for the country, it is homeland” and requested punishment for me. Our lawyers asked for acquittal. The trial was postponed to November 6.
How was the acquittal judgement handed down?
At the last hearing, Lawyer Fatih Aydın stated that the expression “faggot” used within the scope of the mentioned post did not contain any insulting intent, reminded that my post was in support of LGBTI+ people for the Pride March, and underlined that there was no insult to the flag. The court ruled for acquittal since "the elements of the offence did not occur".
“I will file a lawsuit against the newspapers that targeted me”
How do you feel now?
Every day we see a journalist convicted for a social media post or a news report, so I was surprised by the acquittal. Of course there is no crime and of there should certainly be an acquittal, but I was still surprised and surely I am happy for myself and for LGBTI+ rights.
As a result, unfortunately, these cases are decided in the same way as politics. On the one hand, the lawyer Aydoğan Ahıakın, who targeted me and my colleagues, who caused me to receive hundreds of thousands of insults and threats, in other words, who initiated this trial, was rewarded as the party’s political affairs officer by the Kadıköy AKP district presidency. On the other hand, there was no news about the acquittal in any of the newspapers which pointed me as target. I will file a lawsuit for compensation against these organisations after this case, in which the prosecutor’s office found no need to prosecute and I was acquitted.
CLICK - https://kaosgl.org/en/single-news/journalist-semra-celebi-was-acquitted
Translated by: Selma Koçak
Tags: human rights, media
