Insulting the president is considered a punishable crime in Turkey. This draconian policy crashed down onto the life of Dr. Bilgin Çiftçi in October. He lost his job and is currently on trial, facing two years in prison because he posted a meme on his Facebook page. The meme in question compared President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to Gollum from "The Lord of the Rings," according to The Washington Post.
Çiftçi insisted in court that he had not insulted the president, saying that Gollum is a complicated character but not a villain. His lawyer, Hicran Danışman, questioned the chief judge's perception of Gollum, and the judge admitted he'd only seen parts of the movies, according Istanbul's Today's Zaman. Danışman said in a previous hearing that the judge and prosecutor had not seen the movies at all. Çiftçi's lawyer managed, in this way, to get the chief judge to rule for postponing the trial until February 2016.
Judges have been unable to deduce whether or not Gollum is a positive or negative character through the case's four hearings throughout the past two months and subsequently have been unable to decide whether or not Çiftçi directly insulted the president, Fusion noted.
To resolve the issue and decide whether or not Çiftçi will go to jail, the judge has recruited five "Lord of the Rings" experts- two academics, two experts on behavior and an expert on cinema and television- to determine whether a comparison to Gollum is inherently offensive or not, reported The Telegraph.
Çiftçi worked at the Public Health Institution of Turkey, but was expelled in October shortly after he shared the meme.
Over the course of Erdogan's presidency, 236 people have been investigated for insulting the head of state, and 105 were indicted, according to BBC News. Cartoonist Selcuk Erdem said that the country's government lacks a sense of humor and that "they don't want- or like- freedom of speech or criticism."
