The crime of propaganda of terrorist organisations

Terrorism causes irreversible damage to the lives of many people day by day and deeply affects many societies. States and governments try to fight terrorism and the destruction it creates without going beyond the limits of the law. Terrorist organizations, on the other hand, try to explain their ideologies, justify their actions and gain new sympathizers and members through various means in order to fulfill their aims and gain acceptance in the society. In this challenging process, it is our duty as jurists to prevent security concerns from preventing the individuals from violating their legal guarantees and to detect these violations, if any. The freedom of expression, which is one of the fundamental rights of human beings, should be limited within certain rules and protected against the security concerns of the society. In this context, many changes have been made in the Turkish Anti-Terrorism legislation over the years in parallel with the European Convention on Human Rights and the case law of the European Court of Human Rights. While the law developed as the society needed in the fight against terrorism, it also followed the universal human rights law. In our study, considering this difficulty of the fight against terrorism, the scope and limits of freedom of expression, the approach of the European Court of Human Rights and the Turkish Constitutional Court to freedom of expression were analyzed in the first part. In the second part, the Anti-Terror Law No. 3713 and the relevant articles of the Turkish Penal Code, which constitute the legal basis of the fight against terrorism in Turkish Law, were analyzed within the vii framework of crime theory, and the approach of the Court of Cassation to the crime of propaganda of a terrorist organization was evaluated.