Article 301 is an article of the Turkish Penal Code making it illegal to insult Turkey, the Turkish nation, Turkish government institutions, or Turkish national heroes such as Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. It took effect on June 1, 2005, and was introduced as part of a package of penal law reform in the process preceding the opening of negotiations for Turkish membership of the European Union (EU), in order to bring Turkey up to EU standards. The original version of the article made it a crime to "insult Turkishness"; on April 30, 2008, the article was amended to change "Turkishness" into "the Turkish nation". Since this article became law, charges have been brought in more than 60 cases, some of which are high-profile.
On April 30, 2008 a series of changes were made on the Article 301, including a new amendment which makes it obligatory to get the approval of the minister of justice to file a case. This change was made to prevent the possible misuse of the article, especially against high-profile cases, filling up legal holes in the older version.
The Great Jurists Union () headed by Kemal Kerinçsiz, a Turkish lawyer, is "behind nearly all of Article 301 trials". Kerinçsiz himself is responsible for forty of the trials, including the high-profile ones.
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The article currently reads as follows: A person who publicly denigrates the Turkish Nation, the State of the Turkish Republic or the Grand National Assembly of Turkey and the judicial institutions of the State shall be punishable by imprisonment from 6 months to 2 years. A person who publicly denigrates the military and police organizations of the State will too receive the same punishment. Expressions of thought intended to criticize shall not constitute a crime. The prosecution under this article will require the approval of the Minister of Justice.
Before amendments were made to Article 301 on April 30, 2008, the article stated the following: A person who publicly denigrates Turkishness, the Republic or the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, shall be punishable by imprisonment of between six months and three years. A person who publicly denigrates the Government of the Republic of Turkey, the judicial institutions of the State, the military or security organizations shall be punishable by imprisonment of between six months and two years. In cases where denigration of Turkishness is committed by a Turkish citizen in another country the punishment shall be increased by one third. Expressions of thought intended to criticize shall not constitute a crime.
Precursor
Before the current Turkish Penal Code took effect, article 159 of the Turkish Penal Code dated 1926 covered the same offense. Among the earliest uses of article 159 was in 1928, when a number of Jews were convicted of "denigrating Turkishness" in the wake of the Elza Niego affair. Their crime had been to protest the murder of a young Jewish girl by a middle-aged government official.
Article 159 was amended a few times, including in 1961 and 2003, before finally being replaced by the current article 301 in 2005.
High-profile cases
Article 301 has been used to bring charges against writer Orhan Pamuk for stating, in an interview with Swiss magazine Das Magazin, a weekly supplement to a number of Swiss daily newspapers, including the Tages-Anzeiger, that "Thirty thousand Kurds have been killed here, and a million Armenians. And almost nobody dares to mention that. So I do." The charges, which were brought against Pamuk upon a complaint filed by Kemal Kerinçsiz, were later dropped after the Justice Ministry refused to issue a ruling as to whether the charges should stand.
In February 2006 the trial opened against five journalists charged with insulting the judicial institutions of the State under Article 301, and also of aiming to prejudice a court case under Article 288 of the Turkish Penal Code. Each of the five had criticized a court order to shut down a conference in Istanbul about the Ottoman Armenian casualties in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. (The conference was nevertheless eventually held after having been transferred from a state university to a private university.) The charges carried a potential penalty of a prison term of up to 10 years. The court dropped the charges against four of them on April 11, 2006 when it was determined that the time allowed by the statute of limitation had been exceeded, while Murat Belge, the fifth, was acquitted on June 8, 2006.