38 Nobel Laureates Write an Open Letter to Turkey's President, Calling for the Rule of Law and Free Speech

"We call for the state of emergency to be lifted, the rule of law to be restored quickly, and freedom of expression to be enjoyed in full."

On February 28, The Guardian published an open letter from 38 Nobel laureates to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The signatories include the writers Kazuo Ishiguro, Svetlana Alexievich, J.M. Coetzee, V.S. Naipaul and Mario Vargas Llosa; the physicist Philip W. Anderson; the chemist Aaron Ciechanover; and the economist Joseph Stiglitz, among others.

The letter says that the six journalists and writers sentenced to life in prison by a Turkish court in February 2018 were tried unjustly, and that there was no real evidence to convict them. Turkey should restore the rule of law and free speech and release them. If it does not, it will no longer be entitled to call itself part of the free world.

"All of these writers, throughout their careers, have opposed coups and militarism in any form. Yet Turkish prosecutors have accused them of helping an armed terrorist organization carry out a coup," the letter says.

According to Reuters, on February 28 a Turkish court added another 5 years and 11 months to the sentence of the prominent journalist Ahmet Altan. The new charges rested mainly on an article Altan had written earlier. It was said, first, to paint the actions of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) as innocent and, second, to insult President Erdogan. Turkey treats both as crimes. Two weeks before, Altan had been sentenced to life in prison for "taking part in the coup." He had already spent about 17 months in detention before that life sentence came down in February.

Ahmet Altan's brother Mehmet Altan and four other journalists were also charged in February with taking part in the coup, and sentenced. Mehmet Altan was accused of sending coded messages on a television talk show the day before the coup. All six journalists and writers deny the charges.

According to Al Jazeera, Turkey says the journalists are tied to a movement led by the exiled Muslim scholar Fethullah Gulen, whom it calls the mastermind of the failed coup of July 2016. Gulen, who lives in the United States, denies it.

The sentences handed to the six have drawn criticism from the United Nations and many other international bodies, and from a long list of public figures. They are also seen as the latest example of the crackdown Erdogan has run since the 2016 coup attempt.

With this ruling, said Christophe Deloire, secretary-general of Reporters Without Borders, "Turkey's judiciary and the regime that controls the judges have disgraced themselves before the world." "This sets a devastating precedent for other journalists facing baseless charges," said Sarah Clarke, head of policy at PEN International.

The open letter to Erdogan appeared in The Guardian only hours after the February 28 verdict.

Since the 2016 coup attempt, Erdogan has kept gathering power into his own hands and purging his opponents. We have written about this before. On July 15, 2016, a faction inside the Turkish military that favored secularism launched a coup, trying to overthrow Erdogan and halt the country's Islamization. Overnight, roads were blocked and tanks rolled into the streets; civilians were wounded and killed through the night. The revolt was put down within two days. Official figures say 161 civilians and police officers were killed, 104 mutinous soldiers were shot dead and 1,440 people were injured in the fighting.

Erdogan then began a series of political purges. So far more than 50,000 people have been arrested and 110,000 people from the military, the judiciary, schools and the media have been dismissed. He has also taken a series of steps to strengthen his own position. He restructured the military: the General Staff of the Armed Forces and the National Intelligence Organization, once under the Prime Minister's Office, now answer to the presidency. A constitutional amendment passed in an April 2017 referendum means that after 2019 Turkey will give up its parliamentary system and the president will control the government outright. The country's opposition parties fear the change could entrench authoritarian rule in the Middle East's most important power broker.

According to The New York Times, the government also began seizing and confiscating property across the country after the coup. More than 950 companies have been taken over since then, all of them said to have ties to Fethullah Gulen, the Muslim preacher Turkey blames for the coup. From small baklava chains to big listed conglomerates, the government has now taken roughly $11 billion in corporate assets. Thousands of executives stripped of their businesses have fled to distant cities abroad, from Nashville to Helsinki. Others, less lucky, have ended up behind bars, caught in a campaign of mass imprisonment.

The New York Times reports that Erdogan now makes public speeches every day, sometimes several times a day. They are full of nationalist and anti-Western lines, along with poetry and religious sayings, and they extol the glory of Turkish history. He vows to defend Turkey's borders and defeat terrorism, announces how many enemies have been killed, and honors those who died for the nation. This February, at a rally, he urged a six-year-old girl in the crowd to sacrifice herself for the country, and the girl burst into tears on the spot.

In prison, Altan is in despair. He said: "We will spend the rest of our lives alone in a cell three meters long and three meters wide. We will be taken out to see the sun for one hour a day. We will never be pardoned. We will die in our cells."

"We call for the state of emergency to be lifted, the rule of law to be restored quickly, and freedom of expression to be enjoyed in full, so that Ms. Ilıcak and the Altan brothers can win their appeals, and so that they and others wrongly detained are acquitted and released at once. At best, this restoration of order will let Turkey become a proud member of the free world again," the 38 laureates write at the end of the letter.

Appendix: Full Text of the Open Letter From 38 Nobel Laureates to President Erdogan

Dear President Erdogan,

We wish to draw your attention to a view held by a number of authorities on freedom of expression: that the unlawful detention and wrongful conviction of a number of writers and thinkers is damaging the reputation, the national dignity and the public welfare of the Republic of Turkey.

In the Memorandum on Freedom of Expression in Turkey (2017), the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, Nils Muižnieks, gave the following warning:

"The space for democratic debate in Turkey has shrunk dramatically, and a rising wave of judicial harassment has reached most of society, touching journalists, members of parliament, academics and ordinary citizens alike. Government moves against pluralism have produced self-censorship. This decline is happening against a very complicated background, but neither Turkey's failed coup attempt nor other terrorist threats can justify measures that violate press freedom and show such disregard for the rule of law.

"The authorities should act at once: overhaul criminal law and practice, rebuild judicial independence, and renew their commitment to protecting freedom of expression."

The Commissioner's concern plainly stems from the detention in September 2016 of the best-selling novelist and columnist Ahmet Altan. The wave of arrests that followed the failed July coup also caught his younger brother Mehmet Altan, a professor of economics and an essayist, and the prominent journalist Nazlı Ilıcak. These writers were charged with "attempting to overthrow the constitutional order by force or violence." Prosecutors first wanted to charge them with sending "subliminal messages" to coup supporters on a television program. Public ridicule pushed them to change it to "invoking the coup through rhetoric." In the end, Turkey's official Anadolu Agency called the case the "coup-summoning trial."

As the Commissioner's report notes, the evidence put before the judge in Ahmet Altan's case amounted to one story he published in the newspaper Taraf in 2010 (Altan was the paper's editor-in-chief until 2012), three of his opinion columns and one television appearance. The evidence against the other defendants was just as groundless. All of these writers have, throughout their careers, strongly opposed coups and militarism in any form, and yet they stand accused of helping an armed terrorist organization carry out a coup.

The Commissioner regards the detention and prosecution of the Altan brothers as part of a broad crackdown on people who dissent from or criticize the authorities, and he considers such detention and prosecution a violation of human rights and a breach of the rule of law. David Kaye, the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression, agrees, and calls proceedings of this kind a "show trial."

Turkey's Constitutional Court agrees with this criticism. On January 11 of this year it ruled that the pretrial detention of Mehmet Altan and the journalist Şahin Alpay violated their rights and that they should be released. The lower court refused to carry out the higher court's ruling, putting the judicial system itself in breach of the constitution. Mr. President, you should note that this act of defiance, and this unlawful decision, had the support of your government's spokesman.

On February 16, 2018, the Altan brothers and Ilıcak were sentenced to life in prison, a sentence that rules out any future pardon.

President Erdogan, we, the signatories at the end of this letter, share the following view of David Kaye's: "The court's ruling lengthens the journalists' sentences, jailing them for their work, without offering substantive evidence that they took part in (or tried to take part in) the coup, and without ensuring a fair trial. The court's action is a grave threat to journalism, which holds what is left of freedom of expression and press freedom in Turkey."

In April 1998 you were removed as Mayor of Istanbul, barred from public office and sentenced to ten months in prison. Article 312 of the Penal Code convicted you merely for reciting a poem in a public speech in December 1997. You were treated unjustly, unlawfully and cruelly. Many human rights organizations defended you then, and today they are appalled by the unlawful acts taking place in your country. Among them are Amnesty International, PEN International, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Article 19 and Reporters Without Borders.

On February 2, 2009, at a memorial ceremony for Çetin Altan, you declared in public that "Turkey is no longer the old Turkey — the old Turkey that once sent its great writers to prison. That era is gone forever." Sitting in the audience that day were Çetin Altan's two sons, Ahmet and Mehmet. Nine years later they were sentenced to death. Is this not a basic contradiction?

Given all of the above, we speak for the concerns of many Turks, and of many people in Turkey's allied nations and in the multilateral organizations it belongs to. We call for the state of emergency to be lifted, the rule of law to be restored quickly, and freedom of expression to be enjoyed in full, so that Ms. Ilıcak and the Altan brothers can win their appeals, and so that they and others wrongly detained are acquitted and released at once. At best, this restoration of order will let Turkey become a proud member of the free world again.

• Full names of the Nobel laureate signatories, in the order of the original letter:

Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich;

American physicist Philip W. Anderson;

Israeli biologist and chemist Aaron Ciechanover;

South African writer J.M. Coetzee;

French physicist Claude Cohen-Tannoudji;

American organic-synthesis chemist Elias J. Corey;

German chemist Gerhard Ertl;

French physicist Albert Fert;

Swiss-American biochemist Edmond H. Fischer;

American biologist Andrew Z. Fire;

Russian-born Dutch and British physicist Andre Geim;

American physicist Sheldon Glashow;

French physicist Serge Haroche;

American biologist Leland H. Hartwell;

American-British economist Oliver Hart;

British molecular biologist Richard Henderson;

American chemist Dudley Herschbach;

Israeli biologist and chemist Avram Hershko;

American chemist Roald Hoffmann;

German chemist Robert Huber;

British biochemist Tim Hunt;

Japanese-British writer Kazuo Ishiguro;

Jewish-Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek;

American economist Eric S. Maskin;

German biochemist Hartmut Michel;

German writer Herta Müller;

British writer V.S. Naipaul;

American physicist William D. Phillips;

Hungarian-Jewish Canadian chemist John C. Polanyi;

British chemist Richard J. Roberts;

American cell biologist Randy W. Schekman;

Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka;

American economist Joseph Stiglitz;

German-born American biochemist Thomas C. Südhof;

American biologist Jack W. Szostak;

Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa;

Australian pathologist J. Robin Warren;

American biologist Eric F. Wieschaus.

Cover image: Flickr, Unsplash