ANKARA, July 6 (Reuters) – NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said the right to hold demonstrations and media freedom were \u200cessential in democracies, when asked about Turkey\u2019s recent crackdown on \u200cdissidents and restrictions ahead of this week\u2019s summit.<\/p>\n
Turkey will host leaders from the \u200b32 allied countries, as well as officials from NATO’s partners, in Ankara for a summit on Tuesday and Wednesday. Authorities have stepped up security across the capital, banning demonstrations, erecting barricades and closing roads.<\/p>\n
On Sunday, \u200cmore than 100 people \u2060were detained in protest marches organised by leftist parties and groups, while 103 others were arrested as \u2060part of anti-terror raids in Ankara.<\/p>\n
Asked at a press conference about the detentions and arrests \u2014 including those of journalists and a prominent comedian \u2014 \u200bRutte said \u200bdemocracy required more than elections alone.<\/p>\n
“And \u200bof course democracy is for \u200cpeople to organise demonstrations if they so choose. So it’s much more than only free elections, and when it comes to media,” he added, noting that it was important for NATO that media could attend major events in person. Several independent Turkish journalists have \u200cbeen denied accreditation for the summit.<\/p>\n
Turkish \u200bauthorities say the detentions and operations are \u200baimed at uncovering militant \u200bactivity and are not linked to the summit.<\/p>\n
Western countries, \u200cnamely Ankara’s NATO allies, have \u200bgrown silent over \u200bconcerns about human rights and freedoms in Turkey in recent years. Some critics of President Tayyip Erdogan’s government say that has \u200benabled an authoritarian \u200cshift, weakened Turkey’s opposition and overlooked NATO’s founding principles of \u200bdemocracy and rule of law.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Tuvan Gumrukcu and \u200bHuseyin Hayatsever; Editing by Ros Russell)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ANKARA, July 6 (Reuters) – NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said the right to hold demonstrations and media…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6286,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[973,4019,299,2928,7,287,466],"class_list":["post-6285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","tag-allied-countries","tag-demonstrations","tag-mark-rutte","tag-media-freedom","tag-nato","tag-nato-allies","tag-turkey"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6285"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6285\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6286"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}