A Turkish comedian, Deniz Goktas, went on trial in Istanbul on Monday facing charges of insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inciting public hatred and hostility through jokes about Islam, and praising crime and criminals. The 32-year-old was arrested on July 3, a week after releasing a YouTube video of his stand-up show "Dead Sea" that garnered nearly 9 million views, and days after shorter clips on X went viral. His trial is the latest in a widening crackdown on perceived critics of Turkey's moderate Islamist government.

Outside the courthouse, around 50 protesters gathered in pouring rain with umbrellas, chanting "Deniz Goktas is not alone." Supporters, journalists, fellow comedians from Istanbul's TuzBiber club, and observers from the Dutch embassy and US consulate waited to enter. Goktas has been in pretrial detention since July. In a defiant social media post from his cell on Sunday, he quipped: "After 88 days, I'll be handcuffed for the first time and hear a car horn. I'm definitely not missing the handcuffs, but let's see if I've missed the car horn."

The indictment cites specific jokes as exceeding permissible speech, including Goktas calling Erdogan a "shy dictator" and saying he had undergone "a transition to a dictator who is at peace with his own identity." Prosecutors added a charge of praising crime and criminals over a joke about an organized crime family, the Daltons. "A 90-minute show spawns a new charge every two months," Goktas wrote in late August. Because Turkish judges can issue consecutive sentences for multiple convictions, he could theoretically face several years in prison.

According to the Media and Law Studies Association (MLSA), prosecutors cited more than 500 applications to prosecute the performer regarding the show. These were submitted to the Presidential Communication Center, which monitors such issues. One of the groups providing a tipoff was the government-sponsored Presidency of Religious Affairs, known as Diyanet. Erdogan is named as the sole complainant. The MLSA said Goktas' jokes alleged to incite hatred targeted fundamentalist Islam, including references to women in full-coverage swimsuits as "divers" and jokes about "suicide bombers who fast."

Turkey nominally has a secular constitution and guarantees of free speech, but the US and EU have often criticized its application of these standards. The US Commission on International Religious Freedom wrote in a 2022 report that Erdogan's government increasingly relied on speech-based prosecution to "silence individuals who express criticism in religious terms, disclose beliefs or a lack thereof that differ from those of the majority of the population, or engage with religion in a way perceived as 'mocking' or 'irreverent.'" Hundreds of politicians, artists, musicians, journalists, and LGBTQ activists have faced detention or trial in recent years.

Source: www.dw.com