A prosecutor on Wednesday sought a prison sentence for journalist Nisanur Yıldırım on charges of “insulting a public official” in a case filed following a complaint by Turkey’s Culture and Tourism Minister Mehmet Nuri Ersoy.
MLSA - The second hearing in the case against Yıldırım, a reporter for the daily Nefes, was held at the Bakırköy 2nd Criminal Court of First Instance in Istanbul, Turkey’s largest city. The prosecutor asked the court to convict her under Article 125 of the Turkish Penal Code, which criminalizes insult, including insulting a public official over their duties, and to apply provisions increasing the sentence if the offense was committed publicly. The prosecutor also requested that she be deprived of certain rights under Article 53 of the penal code.
Ersoy’s lawyer, Hasan Hüseyin Kalafat, and Yıldırım’s defense lawyer, Merve Bilgin, attended the hearing.
In presenting his final opinion on the merits, the prosecutor referred to expressions used in a July 15, 2025 news story published as the headline and on page 8 of Nefes. The article included statements such as: “How they acquired the prime land in Antalya has been revealed. A $150 million windfall,” “The allocated land said to be worth $150 million if put out to tender today has passed to Tourism Minister Ersoy’s company,” “Treasury land was opened for development without a tender for the minister’s five-star hotel,” and “It has emerged that Nebula, the company of Tourism Minister Ersoy—who traveled to Greece on his luxury yacht—built a hotel without a tender on forest-designated land in Antalya’s Kundu district.”
The prosecutor argued that the article attributed concrete acts to Ersoy, who was serving as culture and tourism minister at the time, and that this constituted the crime of insulting a public official.
The court granted time for Yıldırım’s lawyer to prepare a response to the prosecutor’s opinion and adjourned the hearing until 11:30 a.m. on June 11, 2026.
Background to the case
The charges stem from a July 15, 2025 article titled “A $150 million windfall for the minister’s company.” The report said that Nebula Hospitality, a company owned by Ersoy, had constructed a hotel through an allocation process on forest-designated land in the Kundu area of Antalya, a Mediterranean resort province in southern Turkey known for its tourism industry.
Ersoy filed a complaint alleging that the expressions in the article insulted him and targeted him because of his public office.
In an earlier defense statement, Yıldırım said the information in the article was based on concrete facts that had been reflected in the public domain and should be considered within the scope of journalistic activity.
Turkey’s insult laws, including provisions covering public officials, have frequently been used to prosecute journalists and critics, drawing scrutiny from press freedom advocates and international observers.
