BRITISH ARTIST FINED FOR ART “MOCKING” TURKISH PRIME MINISTER

A British artist whose collage was found to have mocked Turkey’s prime minister has been fined by a court in Istanbul. Michael Dickinson walked smiling from the Kadikoy district court, a free man but not completely off the hook, according to the BBC.

The judge ruled that the British artist had crossed the line with his cartoon, superimposing the head of Tayyip Erdogan on the body of a dog, and found him guilty of insulting Erdogan’s “dignity and honor.” The judge sentenced him to 425 days in prison, the first time anyone has been jailed for criticizing the prime minister. But the sentence was immediately commuted to a fine of about forty-eight hundred dollars.

When a defiant Dickinson insisted he would not pay, the judge explained that, provided he made no new cartoons of the prime minister over the next five years, the fine would be put aside.

“Of course I’m relieved,” he told the BBC outside the court. “I didn’t know what to expect. But I still don’t think I should have been guilty, and I’m not saying I’m not going to make any more cartoons of politicians.”