Dear fellow human rights defenders,

We wish this one finds you and loved ones well and in good health in this crazy period. Well, nicely, summer is here and despite all odds, the Sun helps to feel joyful, anyways.

In a blink of an eye, here comes the Civil Pages’s third monthly newsletter.

At the beginning of this week, the world marked another Press Freedom Day, through which, once again, the focus was on precarious condition of the press and its role as the watchdog of the public interest diminishing worldwide. The consequences have been crippling, even lethal, in countries with ‘hybrid’ and ‘perpetually transitioning’ regimes. Within this global setting, as one of such countries, Turkey’s media has arguably suffered some of the most lethal consequences throughout the country’s gradual lurch toward a de-democratising mode of governance.

To mark this day and help freedom of press and expression regain its rightful place again, Press in Arrest Database of Journalist Prosecutions has published a report titled, The Anatomy of Journalist Prosecutions in Turkey, based on the data it has gathered and analysed by monitoring, documenting and reporting on journalist prosecutions in Turkey.

Despite its gloomy findings, with a bit of dramedy and dark humour, the story of this report sounds like a 101 guide on How to Prosecute a Journalist. To give our audience an understanding of monitoring such crippling judicial proceedings of press trials as a journalist, Onur Burcak Belli have written about the processes and cases the report analysed.

Anatomy of Journalist Prosecutions in Turkey focuses on four main areas that have been identified, through a comprehensive analysis of the database, as the common (but not exhaustive) grounds generating systemic rights violations of journalists in Turkey.

We wish it will contribute to celebrating more joyful World Press Freedom Days in the future.

So, this time, we have dived into reports to help understand the patterns and paradigms of a Turkey in a downward trend of democracy and rule of law with public sphere and civic spaces narrowed by the day. In his article “Symptoms of ‘Power Reflux’ in Turkey” for Civil Pages, Murat Ozbank divulged an answer to another essential question, which incorporates, indeed the matter of freedom of press as well as civil society as pillars of democracy: What exactly is unhealthy and dysfunctional about the Turkish democracy?

You can find many more enlightening articles concerning Turkey and its civic space below and on our Civil Pages web-site.