Turkey: Comedian on trial for 'insulting' Erdogan in show

A Turkish comedian goes on trial in Istanbul on Monday facing charges of insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and other offenses during a stand-up performance in June. 

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. 

A group of around 50 protesters gathered outside the courtroom with umbrellas in pouring rain on Monday morning, chanting "Deniz Goktas is not alone." 

Supporters and journalists were also waiting to enter the courtroom, including several fellow comedians from Istanbul's TuzBiber club, and observers from the Dutch embassy and the US consulate. 

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

What charges does Goktas face? 

Goktas, who has been held in pretrial detention since July, faces an array of charges related to content in his "Dead Sea" show. He referred to his impending court appointment online on Sunday, in one of his irreverent social media posts from his cell. 

"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," he quipped.

Goktas is accused of insulting Erdogan, of inciting public hatred and hostility — via jokes about Islam — and of praising crime and criminals, an addition charge added by prosecutors tied to 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, saying they had added the extra charge against him "for a joke about the Daltons."

Because Turkish judges can issue consecutive jail sentences for multiple convictions, rather than them being served concurrently, Goktas could in theory be exposed to several years in prison. 

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 detenion or trial. 

LGBTQ+ communities in Turkey fear intensifying clampdown

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 Preidency of Religious affairs, better known as Diyanet. 

Erdogan is named as the sole complainant. 

The indictment highlights specific jokes from Goktas' show as exceeding the bounds of permissible speech. 

Goktas describing Erdogan as a "shy dictator" and saying he had undergone "a transition to a dictator who is at peace with his own identity" are listed as the insults against the man in charge of Turkey, either as prime minister or later as president, since 2003. 

Erdogan's 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 proseuction 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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