Timur Soykan’s reports on crime and corruption have earned him awards as well as hundreds of court orders blocking online access to them.
The use of court orders to block online content in Turkey skyrocketed last year, according to Free Web Turkey, which was established by the Media and Law Studies Association, MLSA, to monitor online censorship in Turkey. [The author of this article is coordinator of Free Web Turkey.] The courts tend to cite violations of an individual’s rights, threats to national security and public order, or disinformation.
Soykan has become a regular target.
“If he hadn’t made it his mission to expose the dirty dealings of the government and power centres, he wouldn’t have faced any of these blocks,” said Turkish media ombudsman Faruk Bildirici.
“Soykan is making some people uncomfortable,” he told BIRN, and the courts “have become a weapon of political power to obtain access bans.”
Bildirici said courts appear to issue blanket bans without checking what they are banning.
“We sometimes see that dozens of access block requests are accepted in such a short time that it would be impossible to verify all the links.”
Court bribery exposed
A graduate in Radio, Television and Cinema from the Faculty of Communication, Marmara University, 49-year-old Soykan worked for the newspapers Yeni Yuzyil, Radikal and Posta and is currently a columnist for BirGun daily and a commentator on Halk TV.
For years he has focussed his attention on bribery, corruption and organised crime and their ties to the state, earning the 2021 Transparency Award from the International Transparency Association and the 2022 Press Freedom Award from the Turkish Press Council.
In 2020, his reporting exposed ties between a number of judiciary officials and international crime bosses; in 2022, he wrote about the case of a 14-year-old girl forced into marriage when she was just six years old with a 29-year-old member of a religious sect. His report led to the prosecution of three people, who were sentenced to a total of 72 years in prison in December 2023.
Then in October 2023, Soykan reported that judges and prosecutors at Istanbul’s Anatolian Courthouse had taken bribes; one of them, Judge Sidar Demiroglu, was later dismissed.
Soykan’s achievements, however, have not come without a cost, from death threats to lawsuits.
For his report on the six-year-old girl forced into marriage, Soykan was threatened by people affiliated with the sect. Its supporters launched a campaign calling for his arrest.
In September this year, while attending a hearing in the trial for the murder of Sinan Ates, leader of the ultra-nationalist Grey Wolves, the accused hitman, Eray Ozyagci, threatened Soykan in court, according to witnesses.
The Grey Wolves are affiliated with the far-right Nationalist Movement Party, MHP, a coalition partner of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party, AKP. There was a flurry of speculation at the time of the Ates murder in December 2022 that he may have been killed by his own people after falling out with the MHP.
Addressing parliament on October 1, MHP leader Devlet Bahceli said in reference to Soykan and three other journalists: “Watch your step! We will not allow MHP to be interrogated by four clown reporters.”
Years of media repression
Despite the death threats and hostility, Soykan says what worries him most is the censorship, on top of years of intense media repression under Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Soykan’s story about bribery at the Anatolian Courthouse was blocked by court order just a few hours after it was published, at the request of Istanbul Justice Commission President Bekir Altun, one of those accused of taking bribes for favourable verdicts.
By extension, 77 reports by other outlets and which cited Soykan were also blocked.
Soykan said the court acted “on political orders”.
The judge who blocked Soykan’s reports, Demiroglu, was later dismissed for taking bribes in exchange for issuing such blocks.
Soykan said the authorities were trying to “destroy evidence-based news in a manner that completely disregards the law”.
Readers, however, still search out his work.
“They remove the reports from all platforms and many people reach out to us saying they can’t find our reports,” he said. “We then send the reports via WhatsApp or email, and that’s how they read them.”
Describing criminal court judges as “censorship officers,” Soykan said: “We are living through one of the darkest periods in Turkish press history. Censorship has now become institutionalised.”