Çiğdem Bayraktar Ör, is a historian and political commentator that regularly appears on TV. Photo Credit: Bianet.
Çiğdem Bayraktar Ör, a Turkish academic, historian and political commentator, was detained by the Turkish police on January 30 on charges of “insulting the president” and “insulting a public official because of their duty” based on her social media posts. She was arrested on January 31 on the former charge.
A critic of the Turkish government, Bayraktar Ör has a PhD in Ataturk’s Principles and Revolutionary History and has written several books on modern Turkish political history. Most recently, she was a member of the main opposition party CHP and regularly appeared on television, providing commentary on political developments in Turkey.[1]
While the case against Bayraktar Ör includes several posts on the social media platform X, the main post that seems to have led to her arrest was shared on January 29. In the post, Bayraktar Ör criticized President Erdoğan and his government for a series of scandals that have happened in Turkey over the past years. The post was shared about a week after the fire at a ski resort hotel in Turkey’s Bolu province in which 79 people died and a further 51 were injured. In her statement, Bayraktar Ör denied the charges and said that the recent fire motivated her to make that post.
Bayraktar Ör’s arrest should be seen as part of a broader crackdown on the already limited opposition in Turkey under President Erdoğan and his governing Justice and Development Party. In the past two months, several journalists have been detained, some being sentenced to house arrest and others being arrested. Most recently, five journalists working with the opposition-leaning Halk TV were detained as part of an investigation on the sharing of information on the expert assigned to the case of the CHP-member mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem İmamoğlu. The editor-in-chief of the media outlet, Suat Toktaş, was arrested on January 30. According to the reports of the Committee to Protect Journalists, Turkey is one of the leading jailers of journalists. For the past decade, Turkey has consistently ranked in the top 10 jailers of journalists in the world and has set a new global record for journalists jailed in one country in 2016 with 84 jailed journalists.
In March 2024, a professor of sociology was detained in Istanbul and interrogated because one of her interviewees was under police surveillance. She was released after three days in police detention on probation and with a travel ban. According to the Academic Freedom Index, Turkey is rated 165th among 180 countries in academic freedom.
Endangered Scholars Worldwide (ESW) condemns the weaponization and selective application of repressive legal measures against government critics in Turkey including academics and journalists. We call on the Turkish government and judiciary to immediately release Çiğdem Bayraktar Ör and lift the charges against her. We further call for an end to the pressures on non-state-controlled media and opposition journalists. Academic freedom as a fundamental human right is based on free expression and independent media organs are a prerequisite of this right. We invite the global community dedicated to upholding human rights globally to join our call.
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