A Turkish court on Thursday sentenced two journalists to two years in jail for blasphemy in Turkey.
They reprinted a controversial cover from the French satirical magazine ‘Charlie Hebdo’ above their columns last year.
The judgment is likely to inflame concerns about freedom of expression in Turkey, where opposition newspapers have been seized and a number of journalists have been sued for insulting President Tayyip Erdogan.
Ceyda Karan and Hikmet Cetinkaya, columnists for Cumhuriyet daily, had faced jail terms of up to 4-1/2 years for “insulting religious values” after they reprinted the caricature of the Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) following the January 2015 attacks on ‘Charlie Hebdo’ in Paris.
Muslim Turkey’s constitution strictly separates state and religion but its penal code makes it a crime to insult religion.
For Muslims, any depiction of the Prophet (PBUH) is blasphemous.
