Brussels, 25 November 2016 — At its General Assembly in Strasbourg on Thursday (24 November), the Federation of European Publishers (FEP) was deeply concerned by news that the eminent Turkish novelist and human rights activist Aslı Erdoğan and linguist Necmiye Alpay had been rearrested on Wednesday (23 November), and charged with 'membership of a terrorist organization'.
The Geneva-based International Publishers Association (IPA) has joined a growing international chorus appealing for clemency for Mauritanian blogger Mohamed Ould Cheikh Ould Mkhaitir, whose execution for apostasy is sought by clerics over a post written in December 2013.
The IPA today called on Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım to immediately release jailed author Aslı Erdoğan and linguist Necmiye Alpay and to remember his country’s human rights obligations as the state’s relentless purge of dissenters continues unabated.
The Geneva-based International Publishers Association (IPA), speaking for 64 national publishers’ associations in 59 countries, has condemned the de facto state closure of yet another Turkish publishing house, Evrensel Basım Yayın (Evrensel Publishing House), under the government’s much expanded state of emergency powers.
Michiel Kolman, Chair of the IPA's Inclusive Publishing and Literacy Committee spoke to Dan Conway, CEO of the Publishers Association (UK) about their Inclusivity Action Plan and their past work on diversity and inclusion.
I write this post while returning home from a board meeting of the Accessible Books Consortium (ABC) and the celebration of the Marrakesh Treaty’s 10th anniversary at the World Intellectual Property Organization, WIPO, in Geneva.
