Briton charged over 'insult' to Turkish PM

A British artist is facing up to three years in prison after he was arrested yesterday and charged with insulting the Turkish prime minister's dignity outside an Istanbul courthouse where he was protesting against another freedom of speech trial.

Police detained Michael Dickinson after he refused to put away a poster-sized collage he had made depicting the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as a dog attached to a Stars and Stripes leash. "I wasn't even planning to open it up," the Durham-born artist said on the phone from the police station where he gave a statement.

"But then I said 'in for a penny in for a pound' - if I'm here at all, it's about freedom of speech."

The day had a feeling of deja-vu for Dickinson, who has been living and working in Istanbul for 20 years. He went to court in the morning in support of a Turkish anti-war campaigner, Erkan Kara, who was charged with insulting behaviour for exhibiting a similar piece of his work depicting President Bush pinning a rosette on to Mr Erdogan at a dog show. Dickinson insists he hung his collage without the exhibition organisers' knowledge. "I didn't ask permission to put it up," he says. "I just walked in and put it up."

In his indictment of Erkan Kara, the prosecutor described Dickinson as "ill-intentioned" but declined to press charges for "lack of evidence". "I think he [the prosecutor] was under pressure from the outside, from the government," said Hasan Gungor of Initiative for Freedom of Speech, an Istanbul-based group. "Turkey's under big pressure from the European Union over the issue of freedom of speech, and they didn't want the trial to become international news."

Not everybody has been pleased with the publicity Dickinson has tried to bring to the case. In the crowded corridor of the courthouse before yesterday's trial began, angry words were exchanged between the British artist and members of the Peace and Justice Coalition of which Mr Kara is a member.

"Our concern is the war in Iraq, that's what we're working to put an end to," one woman from the Turkish chapter of the Global Anti-War Movement said. "What you are doing, sticking up pictures of the prime minister as a dog, does not attract people to us, it drives them away."

It was at that point that Dickinson, obviously angry, first unrolled the poster he had been carrying under his arm and displayed it to bystanders.

Since hitting headlines in March 2005 for suing a cartoonist who portrayed him as a cat tangled up in a ball of wool, Mr Erdogan is believed to have earned at least £115,000 in damages from insult cases. The Turkish press have labelled him "damages-rich".