To get off the streets in the winter time and have access to food, a homeless man in the Mediterranean resort Alanya insulted President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan since he had nowhere to live. The court sent him to prison as he wanted, reportedly not for the first time, while thousands of people try to escape from similar legal cases.
“I have nowhere to stay. I sleep in garbage dumps. That is why I resorted to this,” the man, identified only by the initials R.K., said in his statement, according to local outlet Yeni Alanya.
A duty criminal judgeship of peace ordered his formal arrest on charges of insulting the president. He was then sent to prison.
The detention followed a complaint that he had used insulting language about Erdoğan in Sadullahoğlu Park, in Alanya’s Güllerpınarı neighborhood.
R.K. had faced the same charge before, the report said. A subheading in T24’s version of the story described this as his fourth arrest.
Insulting the president is a crime under Article 299 of the Turkish Penal Code, punishable by one to four years in prison. The sentence rises by one-sixth if the insult is made publicly.
Prosecutors opened 194,142 investigations into the offense between 2014, when Erdoğan was first elected president, and 2021, according to Justice Ministry figures. Those inquiries produced 44,675 court cases. Annual investigations rose from 682 in 2014 to 33,973 in 2021. Cases filed climbed from 110 to 9,168 over the same period.
Sözcü reported that the number of complaints and inquiries in such files has topped 200,000 since the switch to the executive presidential system in 2018.
After 2021, the ministry stopped publishing separate figures for the offense. Since 2022, it has grouped Article 299 with related crimes against the state’s symbols of sovereignty and the dignity of its organs. These include Article 301, which covers denigrating the Turkish nation and state institutions.
Under the two articles, prosecutors opened 28,105 new files in 2025, according to ministry data dated April 6, 2026, and reported by the daily BirGün. Criminal courts received 9,348 new files that year. Including files carried over from previous years, the total reached 82,992 by the end of 2025.
Earlier presidents saw far fewer prosecutions. Ministry data show 340 people charged with insulting the president under Kenan Evren (1980–1989), 207 under Turgut Özal (1989–1993) and 158 under Süleyman Demirel (1993–2000). The figure was 163 under Ahmet Necdet Sezer (2000–2007) and 848 under Abdullah Gül (2007–2014).
