Despite objections by both the prosecution and the defence, Metin Aydin, the judge, asked the Justice Ministry to rule on whether Mr Pamuk should be tried as his alleged offence occurred before Turkey’s new penal code came into effect. The old penal code required government approval for such prosecutions.

Mr Pamuk has been charged with “publicly denigrating Turkish identity” by discussing the taboo subject of the killing of Ottoman Armenians during the First World War — something Turkey’s fiercest critics believe amounted to genocide.

“Thirty thousand Kurds and one million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it,” he told a Swiss newspaper this year, the Kurdish toll referring to the separatist insurgency that security forces have been fighting in southeast Turkey since the 1980s.

Mr Pamuk faces up to three years in jail if found guilty, but his conviction would play into the hands of those countries opposed to a poor, predominantly Muslim nation joining the European Union.

Even the scenes at the courtroom yesterday were an embarrassment for a government desperate to prove that it is ready for EU membership. An EU delegation found itself jostling with irate nationalists in a chaotic courtroom that appeared to outsiders to be anything but European.

“I was elbowed in the face by one of the right-wing (prosecution) lawyers,” Denis Macshane, Britain’s former Minister for Europe, said. He was there to support Mr Pamuk. The lawyers wanted the Europeans out of the packed courtroom, he said. The hearing “was one of the weirdest things I’ve seen in my life”.

Groups of nationalist protesters — increasingly evident in Turkey as Europe points a critical finger at the aspiring new member — gathered in the courtroom, in the corridors of the courthouse and outside.

They called Mr Pamuk a traitor, pelted him with eggs and scuffled with the author’s somewhat quieter supporters, who included several leading journalists, activists and writers such as Yasar Kemal. Angry youths also heckled Hrant Dink, an Armenian Turkish journalist and one of the dozens of writers, journalists and publishers currently on trial or convicted under the much-criticised Article 301 of the new penal code.

Mr Dink argues that the article makes a mockery of the reasons behind the reformed penal code, which was rewritten last year to comply with European norms.

Judge Aydin’s ruling will make it impossible for the Government to hide any longer behind its claim that it cannot interfere in the Pamuk case because the judiciary is independent. Camil Eurlings, head of a delegation of MEPs following the trial, said the case represented a test for Turkey’s sincerity in changing its culture of censorship. “If Turkey wants to continue towards the EU, and I hope it will, then really freedom of expression is a fundamental necessity,” he said.

Mr Macshane, who labelled the nationalist demonstrators “secularist Ayatollahs”, said the ball was now firmly in the court of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s Prime Minister: “Turkey is now on trial and has to decide whether to keep on the European road or whether it wants to look east.”

Mr Pamuk remained quiet throughout the hour-long hearing, in which his lawyers argued that the case against him was thin and should be dropped because it had taken too long in coming to court.

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