Arat Dink is a Turkish

Turkey

Turkey , known officially as the Republic of Turkey , is a Eurasian country located in Western Asia and in East Thrace in Southeastern Europe...

 journalist

Journalist

A journalist collects and distributes news and other information. A journalist's work is referred to as journalism.A reporter is a type of journalist who researchs, writes, and reports on information to be presented in mass media, including print media , electronic media , and digital media A...

 of Armenian

Armenians in Turkey

Armenians in Turkey have an estimated population of 40,000 to 70,000 . Most are concentrated around Istanbul. The Armenians support their own newspapers and schools...

 origin and the executive editor of Agos

Agos

Agos is an Armenian weekly newspaper published in Istanbul, Turkey. It was established on 5 April 1996. Today, it has a circulation of over 9,000. It has both Armenian and Turkish pages as well as an on-line English edition...

, a bilingual Turkish

Turkish language

Turkish is a language spoken as a native language by over 83 million people worldwide, making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic languages. Its speakers are located predominantly in Turkey and Northern Cyprus with smaller groups in Iraq, Greece, Bulgaria, the Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo,...

-Armenian

Armenian language

The Armenian language is an Indo-European language spoken by the Armenian people. It is the official language of the Republic of Armenia as well as in the region of Nagorno-Karabakh. The language is also widely spoken by Armenian communities in the Armenian diaspora...

 weekly newspaper published in Istanbul

Istanbul

Istanbul , historically known as Byzantium and Constantinople , is the largest city of Turkey. Istanbul metropolitan province had 13.26 million people living in it as of December, 2010, which is 18% of Turkey's population and the 3rd largest metropolitan area in Europe after London and...

. He is the son of Hrant Dink

Hrant Dink

Hrant Dink or Հրանտ Դինք ) was a Turkish citizen of Armenian descent editor, journalist and columnist....

, the former editor-in-chief of the same paper, who was murdered by Ogün Samast

Ogün Samast

Ogün Samast is a Turkish ultra-nationalist who killed Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink on January 19, 2007 in front of the headquarters of his newspaper Agos, in Osmanbey, Istanbul.-Background:...

, a Turkish

Turkish people

Turkish people, also known as the "Turks" , are an ethnic group primarily living in Turkey and in the former lands of the Ottoman Empire where Turkish minorities had been established in Bulgaria, Cyprus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Greece, Kosovo, Macedonia, and Romania...

 ultra-nationalist who was seventeen years old at the time.

Arat Dink has been brought to trial as a co-defendant as the executive editor of Agos along with Serkis Seropyan, holder of the weekly's publishing license in the third and last case that was opened against Hrant Dink on charges of 'denigrating Turkishness' under Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code

Article 301 (Turkish penal code)

Article 301 is a controversial article of the Turkish Penal Code making it illegal to insult Turkey, the Turkish ethnicity, or Turkish government institutions...

. The charge was pressed in September 2006 after Agos republished a July 14, 2006 interview of Hrant Dink by the Reuters

Reuters

Reuters is a news agency headquartered in New York City. Until 2008 the Reuters news agency formed part of a British independent company, Reuters Group plc, which was also a provider of financial market data...

 news agency where Hrant Dink referred to the 1915 massacre of Armenians

Armenian Genocide

The Armenian Genocide—also known as the Armenian Holocaust, the Armenian Massacres and, by Armenians, as the Great Crime—refers to the deliberate and systematic destruction of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire during and just after World War I...

 in the Ottoman Empire

Ottoman Empire

The Ottoman EmpireIt was usually referred to as the "Ottoman Empire", the "Turkish Empire", the "Ottoman Caliphate" or more commonly "Turkey" by its contemporaries...

 as genocide

Genocide

Genocide is defined as "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group", though what constitutes enough of a "part" to qualify as genocide has been subject to much debate by legal scholars...

.

The charges against Hrant Dink were dropped in the first hearing of the case, originally scheduled for March 22, 2007 and re-scheduled to June 14, 2007 due to his death and continued for Serkis Seropyan and Arat Dink, with the second hearing scheduled for July 18, 2007. At the court hearing, Arat Dink accused judges of contributing to his father's death by making him a target thanks to their high-profile judicial proceedings. "I think it is primitive, absurd and dangerous to consider as an insult to Turkish identity the recognition of a historic event as a genocide," he said, quoted by the Anatolia news agency.

On October 11, 2007, Arat Dink was convicted of insulting Turkey's identity for republishing his father's remarks. He was given a one-year suspended sentence for "insulting Turkishness", like his father before him.

He was awarded the Guardian Journalism Award of the Index on Censorship on 21st of April 2008.