Mavi Boncuk |
The court fined Mesopotamia Broadcast, which controls Roj TV, MMC and Nûçe TV, and stripped them of their right to broadcast after ruling that the broadcaster did indeed receive support from the PKK, the Copenhagen Post reported today.
A Danish appeals court has found a Kurdish satellite TV station and its parent company guilty of inciting terrorism, ordering them to halt broadcasts and nearly doubling their fines to 5 million kroner ($874,000) each.
Last September, police arrested eight people on suspicions of financing the PKK. The court said that between February 2008 and September 2010, the TV channel had supported terrorism by broadcasting PKK messages and that it had accepted money from the outlawed group. A joint press conference of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Danish counterpart, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, was canceled to avoid a crisis stemming from Roj TV’s presence at the March 20 meeting when Erdoğan paid a visit to the Danish capital.
In 2005, during a previous visit to Denmark, a press conference between Erdoğan and former Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen was called off after Danish officials refused Erdoğan’s demand to have the Roj TV correspondent removed from the hall. The PKK is listed as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the European Union and the United States.
The court fined Mesopotamia Broadcast, which controls Roj TV, MMC and Nûçe TV, and stripped them of their right to broadcast after ruling that the broadcaster did indeed receive support from the PKK, the Copenhagen Post reported today.
A Danish appeals court has found a Kurdish satellite TV station and its parent company guilty of inciting terrorism, ordering them to halt broadcasts and nearly doubling their fines to 5 million kroner ($874,000) each.
The decision Wednesday by the Eastern High Court toughened a lower court's ruling last year, which fined them 2.6 million kroner each and did not revoke their broadcast licenses.
But Roj TV has denied any guilt in the case, and one of its lawyers, Bjorn Elmquist, pointed to the fact that the case took eight years to process as proof that it had become a political case rather than a judicial one, the Copenhagen Post said. The channel was fined 5.2 million kroner, but the companies behind the channel were able to continue broadcasting its signal, which caters to Kurds, particularly those in Turkey. The decision, in turn, prompted prosecutors to take the case to the high court in order to stop the channel from broadcasting out of Denmark.
Last September, police arrested eight people on suspicions of financing the PKK. The court said that between February 2008 and September 2010, the TV channel had supported terrorism by broadcasting PKK messages and that it had accepted money from the outlawed group. A joint press conference of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Danish counterpart, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, was canceled to avoid a crisis stemming from Roj TV’s presence at the March 20 meeting when Erdoğan paid a visit to the Danish capital.
In 2005, during a previous visit to Denmark, a press conference between Erdoğan and former Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen was called off after Danish officials refused Erdoğan’s demand to have the Roj TV correspondent removed from the hall. The PKK is listed as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the European Union and the United States.