be increased by one third. Expressions of thought intended to criticize shall not constitute a crime. Precursor Before the current Turkish Penal Code took effect, article 159 of the Turkish Penal Code dated 1926 covered the same offense. Among the earliest uses of article 159 was in 1928, when a number of Jews were convicted of "denigrating Turkishness" in the wake of the Elza Niego affair. Their crime had been to protest the murder of a young Jewish girl by a middle-aged government official. Article 159 was amended a few times, including in 1961 and 2003, before finally being replaced by the current article 301 in 2005. High-profile cases Article 301 has been used to bring charges against writer Orhan Pamuk for stating, in an interview with Swiss magazine Das Magazin, a weekly supplement to a number of Swiss daily newspapers, including the Tages-Anzeiger, that "Thirty thousand Kurds have been killed here, and a million Armenians. And almost nobody dares to mention that. So I do." The charges, which were brought against Pamuk upon a complaint filed by Kemal Kerinçsiz, were later dropped after the Justice Ministry refused to issue a ruling as to whether the charges should stand. In February 2006 the trial opened against five journalists charged with insulting the judicial institutions of the State under Article 301, and also of aiming to prejudice a court case under Article 288 of the Turkish Penal Code. Each of the five had criticized a court order to shut down a conference in Istanbul about the Ottoman Armenian casualties in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. (The conference was nevertheless eventually held after having been transferred from a state university to a private university.) The charges carried a potential penalty of a prison term of up to 10 years. The court dropped the charges against four of them on April 11, 2006 when it was determined that the time allowed by the statute of limitation had been exceeded, while Murat Belge, the fifth, was acquitted on June 8, 2006. Another high-profile case to result from this legislation involved the writer and journalist Perihan Mağden, who was prosecuted for penning an article originally published in the December 26, 2005 issue of Yeni Aktuel, titled "Conscientious Objection is a Human Right". The Turkish military filed a complaint against her in response. In the trial, which took place on July 27, 2006,