As Erdoğan turns the screw we must stand up for human rights in Turkey | Timothy Garton Ash

Free speech is under fire. Victims of the president’s clampdown need the same kinds of support we once offered dissidents in the Soviet Union

If this newspaper were published in Turkey the rest of this column might be entirely blank, except for an author photograph at the top and the words, printed in large type, “124 days deprived of freedom”. That’s what the country’s most important surviving oppositional newspaper, Cumhuriyet, regularly prints for its imprisoned columnists – with the tally of days in jail ticking up and up. One leading columnist, Kadri Gürsel, recently sent a moving letter that begins: “I salute you all with love from B block, ward number 25 of Silivri prison number 9.”

To travel to Turkey today is to journey into darkness: tens of thousands of state employees and thousands of academics dismissed, more journalists locked up than in any other country, and a chilly mist of fear. Hasan Cemal, one of the country’s most celebrated journalists, received a 15-month suspended sentence for a piece of investigative reporting about a leader of the Kurdish PKK – good journalism which the regime travesties as “conducting terror propaganda”. (This week he received another sentence, for “insulting the president”.) Cemal calmly tells me about conditions in Turkish jails.

Related: Angela Merkel urged to ban Erdoğan over jailed German journalist

A handout from Bosphorus University students defending free speech at their uni. sweet + message @onfreespeech pic.twitter.com/bYdVuceHNa

Related: What I’ve witnessed in Turkey is an assault on democracy itself | Owen Jones

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