Turkey has taken another step back in human rights by repressing freedom of expression with a code that carries such stigma it has proved deadly.

In the early 2000s, it was almost routine for writers and intellectuals in Turkey to appear in the corridors of courthouses, one after another. At times they would have to deal with the insults, taunts and threats of angry mobs waiting there for them. The accusation against them was usually the same: denigrating the Turkish identity and the Turkish state under the infamous Article 301 of the Turkish penal code.

Many endured the painful process, from Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk to Booker Prize nominee Elif Shafak, from veteran journalist Hasan Cemal to writer Murat Belge. The sudden flux of intellectuals on trial then was not a coincidence, but signified the resurgence of a taboo against the mere mention of one issue: the 1915 Armenian genocide.

Prosecutors initiated an Article 301 investigation against Pamuk because of his remarks during a 2005 interview in which he said that “30,000 Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it."