TURKEY:A Turkish academic was given a 15-month suspended sentence yesterday for insulting the memory of Turkey's founder Kemal Ataturk, in the latest case to highlight this EU candidate country's dubious record on freedom of expression.
Prosecutors had demanded a five-year sentence for Atilla Yayla, who became the target of a media-led hate campaign after he questioned the ubiquity of images of Ataturk in a public speech he made in November 2006.
Instead the court ruled that an expert should monitor the professor's behaviour for two years.
Speaking from the UK, where he is on sabbatical, Prof Yayla declined to comment on the judgment itself. "All I will say is that without freedom of expression, Turkey cannot call itself a civilised country. If Turks want their country to progress, they must defend the right to speak out."
Turkey's best-known law limiting freedom of speech is an article on insulting Turkishness which has triggered dozens of cases against intellectuals including Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk. But recent years have also seen an increase in the number of cases around the 1951 law used against Prof Yayla.
Last year authorities in the resort town of Bodrum opened an investigation into a 17-year-old girl who doodled a clown's hat on a picture of Ataturk in her school history book.
The headmaster let the girl off after she apologised. But parents of her classmates complained to the local deputy governor, who ordered a start to criminal proceedings.
On January 18th, another court ordered the popular website youtube to be blocked to prevent Turks from seeing videos deemed an insult to Ataturk's name.
In 1925, Ataturk himself commented that expecting help from the dead was a disgrace for a civilised society. But analysts say that the personality cult he founded and which flourished after his death in 1938 has never been as invasive as today.
When 10 million Turks visited Ataturk's grand mausoleum in Ankara in 2006, it was a record. A year later, 15 million people made the trip. In large part, the increased devotion is a response to growing fears for the future of this secular country that has been governed since 2002 by a party rooted in political Islam.
"Ataturk means modernity and civilisation," says Turkan Saylan, organiser of last year's huge secularist marches. "Turks love and respect him like the British love and respect their queen."
Turkey's best-known producer of the statues and busts of Ataturk that grace town squares and public buildings, Necati Inci, is more sceptical.
"Ataturk has become an excuse for the incompetence of secularist politicians," he argues. "These people stick up pictures of him, as though that is enough to endow them with his qualities. It isn't."