Turkey: Comedian convicted for 'insulting' Erdogan in show

A Turkish comedian was convicted in Istanbul on Monday on charges of "insulting" President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and "insulting religious values" during a stand-up performance in June. 

The judge provisionally sentenced Deniz Goktas to 19 months in prison, but ordered his release pending the judicial review and appeal process that would finalized the verdict. 

It was not immediately clear how long this process might take. 

NATO member and EU aspirant Turkey routinely tries people on speech-related offenses, particularly and famously when it comes to supposed "insults" of its longserving leader Erdogan.

What was the case about? 

Deniz Goktas, 32, was arrested on July 3, a week after releasing a YouTube video of his show that was watched nearly 9 million times and a few days after shorter clips he posted on X enjoyed similar rapid success. 

He faced an array of charges related to content in his "Dead Sea" show. Goktas referred to his impending court appointment online on Sunday, in one of his irreverent social media posts from his cell.

Goktas was accused of insulting Erdogan, of inciting public hatred and hostility — via jokes about Islam — and of praising crime and criminals, an additional charge added by prosecutors tied to a joke about an organized crime family, the Daltons 

His trial is the latest in a widening crackdown on people seen as critical of Turkey's moderate Islamist government. Hundreds of politicians, artists, musicians, journalists and LGBTQ activists are among those to face detention or trial. 

LGBTQ+ communities in Turkey fear intensifying clampdown

What did Goktas say in his defense in court? 

Goktas did not dispute the content from his popular show, but did argue in court that he had committed no crimes with his jokes. 

Prosecutors had for instance singled out a pair of references he made to President Erdogan as a "dictator" as illegal insults. 

"Dictator is not an insult: it is a political characterization," Goktas told the court. "As the president and leader of the party that has ruled the country for 25 years, a political comedy show in which Erdogan's name is never mentioned would be neither sincere nor have any connection to reality."

He said that Erdogan should be "open to the art of satire," as he said past presidents in Turkish democracy were. 

"The joke hasn't changed. What has changed is the increasingly fragile leadership that can no longer tolerate the joke," he said. 

The judge nevertheless convicted Gotkas of insulting Erdogan, and downgraded the charge he faced of "inciting hatred and hostility" with jokes about Islam, instead convicting him of the lesser supposed crime of "insulting religious values." 

He cleared the comedian of the third charge of allegedly praising criminality.

Goktas has spent just under three months in pretrial detention, which should count as time served in any potential custodial sentence. 

Erdogan the only claimant, Diyanet religious authority among those to complain

According to the Turkish NGO the Media and Law Studies Association (MLSA), prosecutors cited more than 500 applications to prosecute the performer regarding the show. 

They were issued to the Presidential Communication Center that monitors such issues. One of the groups to provide a tipoff was the government-sponsored Presidency of Religious affairs, better known as Diyanet. 

Erdogan, in charge of Turkey either as prime minister or later president since 2003, was named as the sole complainant. 

His government has attracted attention in recent years for its prosecution of people deemed to have unfairly criticized the authorities, and for the various lawsuits against leading members of the opposition, particularly the CHP. The Turkish president's litigious streak also became headline news in Germany around a decade ago, when he pursued star TV comedian Jan Böhmermann.

Meanwhile the MLSA said that Goktas' jokes alleged to have the potential to "publicly incite hatred and hostility" took aim at fundamentalist Islam, including a reference to women in full-coverage swimsuits being "divers" and joking about "suicide bombers who fast." 

Turkey nominally has a secular constitution and guarantees of free speech. However, the EU and the US 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.'"

Edited by: Elizabeth Schumacher

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