A journalist working for the Özgürlükçü Demokrasi newspaper, Özkan Erdal, has been detained in the Tarsus district of Mersin province, the Evrensel daily reported on Friday.
According to the report, Erdal was stopped by the police as he was walking down a street in Tarsus and detained for carrying a magazine. There was no information about the content of the magazine.
Erdal is currently under custody at the Tarsus Police Department.
A recently released quarterly press report by the Contemporary Journalists’ Association (ÇGD) revealed that 318 journalists were detained and 103 of them were jailed in Turkey over the past year.
Assessing the state of the media in Turkey in a report on the occasion of the first anniversary of a failed coup attempt in Turkey in July 2016, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) concluded that Turkish journalism is in its death throes because President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government has used a state of emergency, declared after the failed coup, to step up a witch-hunt against critics.
“The state of emergency declared five days after the coup attempt has allowed the government to summarily close dozens of media outlets. And Turkey, which is ranked 155th out of 180 countries in RSF’s 2017 World Press Freedom Index, is now the world’s biggest prison for professional journalists, with more than 100 detained,” said RSF.
