TURKEY:TURKEY'S GOVERNMENT yesterday pushed through changes to a law that has come to symbolise limits to the country's free speech, in what appeared a half-hearted attempt to kick-start stalled EU accession proceedings.
Brought in as part of an EU-backed reform package in 2005, article 301 of the penal code has been used to prosecute hundreds of people, including Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk, for "insulting Turkishness". After growing EU calls for the law to be scrapped Turkish foreign minister Ali Babacan said last October: "301 has become a brand name, like Levis 501s."
Yesterday's reform, which legislators backed by 250 votes to 65, makes it a crime to insult the Turkish nation rather than Turkishness, and cuts the maximum sentence from three years to two.
More importantly, the justice minister's permission will now be required for cases to be opened under the article.
"It wouldn't win a beauty contest for legal changes," says Joost Lagendijk, a Dutch MEP who heads a joint EU-Turkey parliamentary committee. "But at least nationalist-minded prosecutors can no longer act on their own initiative. This is a positive step."
Fethiye Cetin, lawyer for the family of Hrant Dink (a Turkish-Armenian editor shot dead by a nationalist last January after he was convicted under article 301), says the changes would not have saved Dink from prosecution.
"They call the justice ministry's involvement new, but it's just a return to the pre-2005 procedure," she says. "Dink's prosecution was given the ministerial go-ahead too." Somewhat surprisingly, Ms Cetin's criticisms are echoed by several members of the ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, which voted the changes through.
"This law shouldn't be in the penal code at all - changing it is like putting lipstick on a scarecrow," says one MP who asked not to be named. For the MP, the half-hearted change was born out of efforts to maintain good relations with the nationalist opposition.
Looking for ways to avoid a closure case for allegedly anti-secular activities, the AKP is currently mulling constitutional changes that could require nationalist support to pass through parliament.
Privately, nationalists admit the new version of 301 is almost indistinguishable from the old one.
Publicly, they present the changes as little short of treasonous.
"Slandering Turkey's honourable history, insulting the Turkish nation and the values of Turkishness has become a habit with AKP's political thinking," nationalist leader Devlet Bahceli told deputies before the vote.
Constitutional lawyer Levent Korkut argues that it is not reformism but this sort of compromise that has brought AKP close to collapse. Turkish politics is like riding a bicycle, he says: "If you stop, you fall off. If the government wants to live, it needs to speed reforms up."
There's plenty left to do. While 301 grabbed all the international attention, human rights activists say there's at least half a dozen penal code articles that need changing.