A TURKISH court secured a small victory for freedom of expression yesterday by acquitting the writer Elif Shafak of “insulting Turkishness” through the characters of a novel.

However, the unusually swift outcome to the case elicited only qualified applause from rights campaigners and the European Union, who have urged reform of the laws under which the author was charged.

Hours after Mrs Shafak was acquitted Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Prime Minister who has been criticised for failing to speak out against a tide of similar cases against writers and intellectuals, suggested that the Government might be prepared to revise Article 301 of the penal code, under which they are brought.

Chief judge Irfan Adil Uncu cleared Mrs Shafak because of lack of evidence that she had committed an offence. Even the prosecutor, who had originally been obliged to take on the case by a higher court, read out a statement saying that the writer should be acquitted, which she was, with a speed even the most optimistic of her defenders had not expected.

“I’m very happy with the outcome but only on a personal basis. As long as 301 is out there and interpreted or misinterpreted like that there will be many other cases like this,” Mrs Shafak, 34, said after the hearing, which she did not attend because she was nursing a baby delivered by Caesarean section five days ago. She would have faced up to three years in jail if convicted for comments made by protagonists in The Bastard of Istanbul on the massacre of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire, something that many Turks deny was genocide.

Joost Lagendijk, co-chairman of the EU-Turkey joint parliament committee, invited Turkish politicians to stand by their liberal statements of a year ago, when they successfully campaigned against much opposition for a start to accession negotiations with the EU.

Mr Erdogan said that the Government and Opposition should join in discussing a reform of Article 301.

But Richard Howitt, a European Member of Parliament, said: “We have been talking to the Turkish Government about this since late 2004. We have prosecutors and lawyers who are wilfully misinterpreting this law, and for this reason it needs to be abolished completely.”

Many people in and outside Mr Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AK) are embarrassed by the use of supposedly reformed laws to drag top public figures through the courts. They are also under great pressure by the international community to improve freedom of speech. But election concerns and the desire to avoid being seen to bow to an outside body such as the EU had led to a policy of waiting for the courts to set a positive precedent, rather than reforming the law outright.

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