Dear Mr Minister

First of all, I would like to extend you my sincere New Year greetings. I wish you strong health and success in all your future endeavors for the good of the Greek people.

I hope that you are informed on the events regarding the destiny of the Greek citizen Yanis Galanos.

The case is the following:

To Secretary-General of the International Federation of Journalists Ms. Elisabeth Costa, Editor-in-chief of Hürriyet Daily News newspaper Mr.Murat Yetkin.

The primary task of the journalist is to ensure citizen’s right to accurate and objective information through truthful coverage of events, when facts are reported in proper context indicating correlation of various phenomena without distortions, being creatively processed by the journalist. In such a case, the public has a possibility to form a true picture of real developments through access to accurate information, in which roots and nature of events, development process and current state of facts are objectively reflected. (Objective coverage is the journalist’s duty – International Principles of Professional Ethics in Journalism).

FIDH – International Federation for Human Rights – Press release

Paris, 13 December 2013 – In an unusually scathing report that is in line with FIDH’s own findings, the United Nations’ main anti-torture body expressed its utmost concerns over the widespread and systematic use of torture in Uzbekistan. The UN Committee Against Torture (CAT) called for prompt, impartial and effective investigations into all allegations of torture and ill-treatment.

“Slander is a more cruel weapon than a sword, as the wounds which the former gives are always incurable,” once said Henry Fielding, a great English philosopher and novelist. How much psychological and physical suffering can slander give a person? And what if a certain slander has been published in a newspaper, which has thousands of readers?

Asli Baris, a journalist from high-circulation Turkish newspaper Hürriyet, known for her fashion stories, wrote in the story titled “My Life like The Magnificent Century”, “First Daughter of Uzbekistan Gulnara Karimova strikes back at recent claims” that during negotiations with the Uzbek president’s daughter, she got a letter into her email account from a secret encrypted and email, in which Gulnara Karimova wrote to her: “I’ll give you an interview, but you will write only what I say … And you should publish this interview without a delay as even we do not know what will happen soon.”