Turkey: Constitutional Court rules to violation in "censoring" dream

Turkey's Constitutional Court ruled that a prison administration violated the right to information by censoring an inmate's letter in which he told his wife about a dream he had.

Rahmi Cagan, who has been incarcerated over "terror" charges, had filed a complaint with the office of the judge of execution after a part of his letter where he told about his dream was censored.

Cagan applied to the Constitutional Court after he learned in March 2019 that his complaint was rejected by a heavy penal court, who said that the prison administration acted lawfully by censoring the letter because the censored part could have contained secret messages to a terrorist organization.

The Constitutional Court recently ruled that by censoring a part of the inmate's letter, the prison administration had violated the right to information. The court ordered the applicant to be paid a compensation of 3,000 TL (approximately $160).

Cagan had asked for a compensation of 65,000 TL (approximately $3,460).

In the part censored by the prison administration, Cagan tells his wife that in his dream he was released from prison and started looking for work, that he was accepted to a factory and felt joy.