YEREVAN (Armenpress)–Reporters Without Borders last week condemned new charges by Turkish prosecutors against the owner and editor of Turkey’s only bilingual Armenian-Turkish daily newspaper, Agos.
The daily’s owner, Serkis Seropyan and its new editor Aris Nalci have been charged for publishing an editorial in November criticizing the one-year suspended prison sentences passed in October against Seropyan, former editor Arat Dink and two other journalists, Aydin Engin and Karin Karakasli.
Seropyan and Nalci were summoned by an Istanbul prosecutor and ordered to pay a fine of 23,500 euros because of the editorial, reported Reporters without Borders.
When they refused, the prosecutor said they would be tried for "attempted obstruction of justice" under article 288 of the criminal code, which carries a maximum penalty of four a half years in prison.
This prosecution is yet another case of improper use of the law, according to Reporters Without Borders.
Seropyan, Dink and the two Agos journalists had been given one-year suspended sentences last year for reprinting an interview Hrant Dink gave to Reuters in 2006 in which he called the massacres of Armenia’s from 1915 to 1917 a genocide. Hrant Dink was assassinated on January 2007.
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