The diverse methods through which the Turkish government continues to weaponise the judicial system to harass and target women journalists critical of its rule have been exposed in a report by The Coalition For Women In Journalism (CFWIJ). The media freedom organisation documented a broad range of violations and legal mechanisms used to harass female reporters through Turkey’s court system, finding that “journalists are often entangled in years-long legal battles, subjected to prolonged pre-trial detentions, and restricted by travel bans once they become targets of judicial harassment.”
In a statistical analysis, of a total 164 legal harassment cases, CFWIJ documented 53 terror-related charges against women reporters in Turkey between 2019 and 2014, cited as the most common method of legal harassment used target and silence the journalists. Legal charges over ‘insult’ (16 cases), violating demonstration law (9) and defamation (6) were also commonly used to target female reporters.
“Journalists have been tried and sentenced for sharing posts on social media about news – particularly related to Kurdish issues or criticisms of the Turkish military and for publishing investigations into wrongdoings by state officials,” CFWIJreport. “The Kurdish press is by far the most targeted group, but leftist media outlets and journalists are also disproportionately persecuted.”
Waves of arrests have targeted female journalists, including all-women network Jin News, as previously reported by Medya News. Most recently, journalists from Jin News and Mesopotamya Agency (MA) were sentenced to six years and three months behind bars in Turkey, charged on “baseless claims of terrorism”, also reported by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).
Of particular note, since 2019 “54% of all legal harassment cases against women journalists documented by Women Press Freedom have involved Kurdish reporters or those covering Kurdish matters,” according to the CFWIJ report. “Of the 87 women journalists charged with terror-related offences, 78% were working for Kurdish media or reporting on Kurdish issues and politics.” The findings thus present an intersection between the targeting of the Kurdish press and women working in media, placing these reporters at particular risk of harassment and persecution.
The CFWIJ report collects multiple case studies of Kurdish women journalists who have been targeted through judicial means and harassed for their reporting on the Kurdish political question and other social and political issues. For example, for women journalist Ayşe Kara an acquittal on charges of terrorism in 2021 was overturned in 2024 by the Diyarbakır (Amed) Regional Court of Justice, leading to a retrial. CFWIJ identify this type of repeated targeting through judicial means as a particularly common form of abuse, describing the retrial as a “misuse of the judicial system, perpetuating harassment against Kara and undermining press freedom in [Turkey].”
More broadly, in 2023 Turkey was ranked the world’s ninth largest jailer of journalists, according to the annual report of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). The country was ranked fifth in the CPJ’s report last year, and held the top spot for jailing journalists in 2016 and 2017. In 2019, the country was identified as having the highest number of imprisoned female journalists.
Turkey has also targeted journalists outside its borders. On 23 August, a Turkish drone attack targeted and killed journalists Gulîstan Tara and Hero Bahadin, both women, and injured six others, including journalist Rêbîn Bekir, as part of an ongoing wave of attacks in Iraqi Kurdistan.
