Turkish EU Minister Bağış defends journalist arrests

BRUSSELS - Doğan News Agency (DHA)

Egemen Bağış. AA Photo

None of the arrested journalists were detained for "their profession," Turkey's EU Minister Egemen Bağış said recently during a speech at the EU Press Club.
 
"They were detained either for some criminal allegations, either with the claim that they were members of an illegal organization or they were involved in the undemocratic toppling of a democratically elected government," Bağış told the Press Club audience.
 
"There are much stronger anti-government members of the media. They're fine."
 
The issue instead is their illegal activities, Bagış said, and "even the private conversations of the prime minister with his own wife, in his own bedroom" were recorded illegally.  
 
Bağış said the decision was not with his government, but with the judicial branch, for which his party was not allowed to recruit any new judges for the first eight and a half years of their rule.