According to the 2025 global report by Freemuse, restrictions on artistic freedom have moved far beyond isolated incidents of censorship, becoming a “structural and institutionalized regime” that permeates nearly every part of the cultural sector.
Judicial review measures in the form of a ban on leaving the country and reporting to the designated officials at certain times on charges of “insulting the signs of the state’s sovereignty” were imposed on two young people who were detained on the grounds that they “insulted the Turkish passport” in a humorous video they shot in TikTok
Ministry of Family, Labor and Social Services decides that three more books are “capable of having a harmful effect on the development of children” due to certain expressions included in their content. Translator Suzan Geridönmez reacts to the decision
Impeding the concert to be held by Grup Yorum in Yenikapı, the police battered and detained 25 people
In a hearing that took place on Friday, the court ruled in favour of the continued detention of the artist Hozan Canê, who was arrested in 2018 for alleged ‘membership to a terrorist organisation’
Fırat Aydınkaya, the attorney of poet İlhan Çomak who has been imprisoned for a quarter of a century, writes in SUSMA about the ‘‘unjust’’ trial which has been continuing for 22 years
Access was denied to news stories reporting that workers at the Oba Pasta factory in Gaziantep-Turkey had contracted the coronavirus on grounds that they “cause reputational damage”
Grup Yorum denied the news that their application to İstanbul Governorate for a concert had been approved
In Turkey, directors of the documentary movie Bakur (North) were sentenced to 4 years and 6 months in prison. This marked one of the harshest penalties imposed so far over the allegation of “disseminating terrorist group propaganda”. Speak Up Platform prepared a timeline of the Bakur trial and the developments surrounding it