174 News Reports Violate Refugee Rights in a Week, Says Report

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The Media and Refugee Rights Association has released its first report on media representation of refugees in Turkey. Published as part of Media Radar (Medya Radar) project of the association, the report has shown that the majority of the news published in Turkey from December 7 to 13 criminalized the refugees and reinforced prejudice against them.

According to the Media Radar report of the association, 174 news reports violated the rights of refugees in one week.

Other highlights from the report are as follows:

Right of asylum disregarded, associated with crime

* The highest number of rights violations were committed in news about the refugees intercepted by Coast Guard teams at sea. There was an attempt to criminalize refugees by using expressions such as "illegal immigrants", "conducted operations" and "caught".

* While the refugees' right of asylum was disregarded in the news, their attempts to seek asylum were associated with crime.

Media reinforces prejudices against refugees

* The news report published by the Anadolu Agency on December 11, 2019 and entitled "5,949 irregular migrants were deported from İstanbul in 6 months" indicated that some refugees were deported due to their "disturbing" behavior; however, it did not explain what this "disturbing" behavior was.

* As no clear information was given about the underlined behavior, it reinforces prejudices and stereotypes about refugees.

News reinforce perception towards refugees as criminals

* Refugees were also faced with rights violations in news about the incidents concerning public order. For instance, the news report published on Sakarya Yeni Haber local news website on December 12, 2019 and entitled "Masked burglar stealing computers turns out to be an Iraqi refugee" emphasized his identity as "Iraqi" and "refugee" in the headline, which caused the subjects to be generalized and directly attributed with crimes. The origin of the person who did the burglary is irrelevant to the content of the news. This attitude creates and reinforces the perception that all refugees are criminals or inclined to commit crimes and disturb the order of the society.

Refugees were called 'illegal immigrants'

* In news, refugees were mostly called "illegal immigrants", "immigrants", "Syrians" and "Afghans", they were rarely called "refugees" and "asylum seekers". Moreover, refugees were also called "assaulters", "dealers", "foreigners", "suspects" and "murderers" in some cases.

* Of 174 news reports violating the rights of refugees in a week,133 reports were published on national news websites and 41 were published on local news websites. The highest number of rights violations on a local level were detected in Denizli, which is one of the satellite cities in Turkey.

* The highest number of news violating the rights of refugees were about their border-crossing and incidents related to public order. While 115 news were reported about the border-crossing of refugees, 39 news were about incidents of public order. It was constantly stressed that there are "more than 4 million refugees in Turkey" and they were not considered newsworthy apart from the news on sea crossing and incidents of public order.

(EMK/SD)