Seán Crowe (Dublin South West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Is it the case that all those present at this meeting probably would be arrested if this discussion were taking place in Turkey?

It is a candidate country for EU accession. We are discussing the arrest and treatment of journalists in Turkey and that is a reflection of what is happening in society there. Following the coup, the Turkish Government has been able to put forward excuses for what has been happening. Approximately 32,000 people have been arrested, 1,500 people are still in police custody and 70,000 to 110,000 people have been dismissed from their jobs. Recently, the government decreed that 10,000 civil servants be dismissed from their jobs. Two elected mayors were arrested last week in the city of Diyarbakir, the Kurdish capital. Twenty-two elected mayors are currently in prison in Turkey and 33 more have been removed. That gives us a sense of what is happening in society there. Sixty party members of the Kurdish leftist pro-opposition HDP have been arrested and members of its sister party have also been arrested. The excuse given for those arrests was the attempted coup.

Am I right in saying that many of the people who have been arrested, including many of the journalists, are people who spoke out against the coup? There is a view that this is all about President Erdogan going for a one-party state and wiping out all the opposition. That seems to be pattern. Would the witness agree that, following the coup, the government is trying to achieve a long-term goal of quelling and silencing any independent or critical voices in the country?

The Cumhuriyetnewspaper, which was the last remaining source of independent news and information, was the latest one to be closed on 31 October. It was a very liberal newspaper and was nothing similar to the politics of Mr. Gulen and his boss, Alaattin Çakc. It was the newspaper that published news of the Turkish Government supplying arms and ammunition training to Islamic jihadists in Syria. Another pro-Kurdish newspaper, the Özgür Gündemdaily newspaper, which had been in operation for 25 years, has been forced to closed. Journalists who protested against that were arrested.

The witnesses mentioned a number of points in their statement that they would request the Turkish Government to do. Are they seeking that we would support those points, perhaps as a part of a motion we could put forward? How do they believe we can best help those journalists and media organisations battling against the autocratic censorship in Turkey? Social media was mentioned, the so-called citizen journalists and others who use the Internet. Is the International Federation on Journalists also focusing its campaign on the government's crackdown on these areas of free speech?