The BBC said on Thursday that Turkey expelled a correspondent who covered antigan government demonstrations in the country, after its prisoner and labeled “a threat to public order”.
The diffuser said in a statement That Mark Lowen, one of his correspondents, was detained in Istanbul where he covered the demonstrations and the political crisis inflamed by the arrest last week of Ekrem Imamoglu, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Mr. Lowen was taken from his hotel on Wednesday and held 5 p.m., said the BBC.
“To be detained and expelled from the country where I previously lived five years and for which I have such a affection was extremely painful,” Lowen said in a statement after his arrival in London on Thursday. “Press freedom and impartial relationships are fundamental for any democracy.”
The broadcaster would contact the Turkish authorities, said Deborah Turness, director general of BBC News.
“No journalist should face this type of treatment simply for doing their job,” she said, and called the Treatment of Mr. Lowen “extremely disturbing”.
Turkey has not announced the expulsion and Turkish officials did not respond to a request for comments.
Hundreds of thousands of Turks protested in cities across the country since the arrest of Mr. Imamoglu on accusations of corruption and support for terrorism. On Wednesday, around 170 people were imprisoned while waiting for the trial while waiting, said the country’s interior ministry.
Imamoglu, who was withdrawn from his post as mayor and imprisoned pending accusations of corruption, said his arrest was politically motivated. The criticisms of Mr. Erdogan said that movements were the last example of his increasingly authoritarian tactics after two in power.
Mr. Lowen, a well -known correspondent who previously lived in Türkiye for five years, was not the only journalist to be taken in repression. Of the more than 1,300 people who, according to the Ministry of the Interior, were arrested as part of the demonstrations, 11 were journalists. Seven of the journalists detained, including a photographer from the French news agency Agency France-Press, were released at no cost on Thursday.
Human rights activists and media experts said the treatment of Mr. Lowen and other journalists was a strong escalation of government efforts to abolish or intimidate independent journalism.
“The sources of credible media, traditional and international, have not been so targeted in recent years,” said Emma Sinclair-Webb, director of Turkey at Human Rights Watch.
“This represents a whole start,” she said, adding that repression was part of a “large-scale assault against democracy”.
Emre Kizilkaya, a Turkish journalist and a member of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy from Harvard Kennedy School, said the media had long been targeted by the government, but that the atmosphere during the demonstrations was “unprecedented”.
“Mark Lowen’s case cannot be considered an isolated incident,” he said.
Before the demonstrations, journalists in Türkiye were faced with “online systematic censorship” and “arbitrary prosecution”, according to journalists from the group of borderless rights, who classified Turkey 158th out of the 180 countries in his world freedom index of the 2024 press.
The group condemned Mr. Lowen’s treatment in a statement on Thursday, and said earlier in the week The fact that the detention of journalists during demonstrations represented an increase in government pressure on the press. “This is the first time that clearly identified journalists who were in the workplace have been sent to prison under this law against public gatherings and demonstrations,” said Erol Onderoglu, the representative of Turkey for borders without borders.
Ben Hubbard Contributed reports of Istanbul.
