Leipzig, 6 July 2017. The German-Turkish journalist Deniz Yücel and Turkish journalist Asli Erdoğan will be honoured together this year with the Leipzig “Prize for the Freedom and Future of the Media”, which is endowed with 30,000 euros. Following Ahmet Altan (2009), Nedim Şener (2015) and Can Dündar & Erdem Gül (2016), the choice of Deniz Yücel and Asli Erdoğan means the award will once again go to journalists threatened or already incarcerated by Turkey’s judiciary under President Erdoğan. By selecting these award winners, the Media Foundation aims to demonstrate solidarity with all journalists who face wide-scale repression in Turkey for advocating the right to report freely.
The awarding of our prize to Deniz Yücel and Asli Erdoğan is linked to a promise to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan who is taking part in the G20 Summit in Germany. He and his government can no more get rid of the demand for a return to press freedom and the release of arbitrarily arrested journalists than they can escape the responsibility for their political actions, for which they will some day be accountable”,
explains Stephan Seeger, Managing Director of the Media Foundation of Sparkasse Leipzig.
A famous poem by theologian Martin Niemöller ends with the line: ‘Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me’. With this in mind, the media prize jury stresses that we will not simply get used to the persecution of journalists in Turkey,”
stresses Seeger. “With Deniz Yücel and Asli Erdoğan, we honour two journalists who go about their work with conviction and tenacity, who are serious about the original promise of democracy in the Republic of Turkey, and whose critical reporting has resulted in their persecution by that same republic.”
"We very much welcome the choice of the laureates,” says Lutz Kinkel, Managing Director of the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom in Leipzig.
President Erdoğan is trampling on the European Charter on Press Freedom and is moving further and further away from the Europe’s democratic consensus.
The Turkish judiciary is trying to silence oppositional voices with ambiguous legal paragraphs. Deniz Yücel is one of more than 150 journalists in jail. We must make it clear to President Erdoğan: journalism is not a crime.”
Statements by former award winners can be found on the Foundation’s homepage. The award ceremony takes places in Leipzig on 6 October, 2017.