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The BBC said on Thursday that Turkey had deported a correspondent who was covering the antigovernment protests in the country, after he was detained and labeled “a threat to public order.”
The broadcaster said in a statement that Mark Lowen, one of its correspondents, was detained in Istanbul where he was covering the protests and political crisis ignited by the arrest last week of Ekrem Imamoglu, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s top rival. Mr. Lowen was taken from his hotel on Wednesday and held for 17 hours, the BBC said.
“To be detained and deported from the country where I previously lived for five years and for which I have such affection has been extremely distressing,” Mr. Lowen said in a statement, after arriving in London on Thursday. “Press freedom and impartial reporting are fundamental to any democracy.”
The broadcaster would reach out to the Turkish authorities, said Deborah Turness, the chief executive of BBC News.
“No journalist should face this kind of treatment simply for doing their job,” she said, and called Mr. Lowen’s treatment “extremely troubling.”
An official from the Turkish government’s Directorate of Communications said Mr. Lowen had been deported because he didn’t have a press card or accreditation to work in Turkey.
Hundreds of thousands of Turks have protested in cities across the country since the arrest of Mr. Imamoglu on accusations of corruption and supporting terrorism. About 170 people have been jailed pending trial, the country’s interior ministry said as of Wednesday.
Mr. Imamoglu, who was removed from his post as mayor and jailed pending trial on the corruption charges, has said his arrest was politically motivated. Critics of Mr. Erdogan said the moves were the latest example of his increasingly authoritarian tactics after two decades in power.
Mr. Lowen, a well-known correspondent who had previously lived in Turkey for five years, was not the only journalist to be caught up in the crackdown. Of the more than 1,300 people that the interior ministry has said have been arrested in connection with the protests, 11 were journalists. Seven of the detained reporters, including a photographer for the French news agency Agence France-Presse, were released without charge on Thursday.
Human rights activists and media experts said the treatment of Mr. Lowen and other reporters was a sharp escalation of government efforts to suppress or intimidate independent journalism.
“Credible, mainstream, international media sources have not been targeted so much in recent years,” Emma Sinclair-Webb, Turkey director at Human Rights Watch, said.
“This represents quite a departure,” she said, adding that the crackdown was part of a “full-scale assault on democracy.”
Emre Kizilkaya, a Turkish journalist and a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, said the media had long been targeted by the government but the atmosphere during the protests was “unprecedented.”
“Mark Lowen’s case cannot be considered as an isolated incident,” he said.
Before the protests, journalists in Turkey faced “systematic online censorship” and “arbitrary lawsuits,” according to the rights group Reporters Without Borders, which ranked Turkey 158th out of the 180 countries in its 2024 World Press Freedom Index.
The group condemned the treatment of Mr. Lowen in a statement on Thursday, and said earlier in the week that detentions of journalists during the protests represented an increase in government pressure on the press. “This is the first time that clearly identified journalists who were in the middle of working have been sent to prison under this law against public gatherings and protests,” Erol Onderoglu, the Turkey representative for Reporters Without Borders, said.
Ben Hubbard contributed reporting from Istanbul.
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