The European Parliament has slammed the sentencing of Turkish DW journalist Bulent Mumay as part of a "pattern of judicial harassment and censorship" against Turkey's "independent media" in a resolution passed on Thursday.

The coordinator of DW's Istanbul bureau was handed a 20-month suspended sentence in May last year for "obtaining and publishing personal data without permission". He began serving his term this June following an unsuccessful appeal.

The journalist had posted on social media about Met-Gun Insaat, a construction company with ties to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that had intervened in city politics and gotten public funds seized. His posts on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, defied an official order not to report on the issue.

On Thursday, EU lawmakers called on Turkish authorities to drop the charges against him and "all other arbitrarily detained media workers, political opponents, human rights defenders, civil servants and academics."

At a debate in Strasbourg on Wednesday, liberal lawmaker Lucia Yar of Slovakia described the case against Mumay as "baseless" and said........

© Deutsche Welle