A new investigation was filed against video activist and documentary filmmaker Oktay Ince. An investigation has previously been opened against İnce due to “praising terrorism” through the Twitter posts made by an account named, “Seyri Sokak;” İnce’s entire archive was confiscated during the raid against his house in Izmir on October 16, 2018. İnce has then started to protest in front of Izmir Governorate in order to get his 20-year archive back. Ince is now charged with “insulting the President.”
After Ince’s professional and personal archive was confiscated, PEN America wrote a letter to Minister of Justice Abdülhamit Gül, Minister of the Interior Süleyman Soylu and Minister of Culture and Tourism Mehmet Nuri Ersoy and asked them to return all confiscated video, photograph and text archives back to Ince at once. The letter interpreted the incidents as an attempt to penalize independent artistic expression, emphasized that freedom of expression was guaranteed by the Constitution and indicated that Turkey did not fulfill its international promises. In the letter he wrote as a reply to PEN America’s letter, Soylu claimed that “the Republic of Turkey is a state of law with respect to human rights.”
02.05.2019
bianet.org