A CRIMINAL CHARGE of insulting his nation leveled against the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk was officially dropped yesterday, ending an embarrassing chapter in Turkish justice that has drawn sharp criticism from human rights activists.

Pamuk’s lawyer said the writer’s trial had been abandoned after a court decided it could not hear the case after the Turkish government decided it should not be pursued.

His trial opened and was postponed on December 16 amid chaos inside and outside an Istanbul court house.  Proceedings were due to recommence on February 7.

One of Europe’s most celebrated writers, Pamuk was charged with “insulting Turkish identity” in a magazine interview last spring in which he spoke about the deaths last century of Kurdish and Armenian civilians at the hands of Turkey.

His comments enraged Turkish nationalists and prompted a prosecutor in Istanbul to pursue a case against him under Article 301 of Turkey’s criminal code, which makes it an offence to “insult” Turkey and its institutions.

The case damaged Turkey’s international reputation, especially in the European Union which it is seeking to join.

The failure of the case came in the washup of a complicated game of buck-passing between the judicial system and the government.  The December hearing was postponed because the court ruled it had not received permission from the justice ministry for the case to go ahead.

The court flicked the case into the government’s court, and over the weekend it emerged that Cemil Cicek, Turkey’s justice minister, had written to the court advising he had no jurisdiction to rule on the validity of the case against Pamuk.

Cicek’s decision persuaded the court against pursuing the case against the writer, his lawyer said.

Pamuk has won wide international acclaim for his novels My Name is Red and Snow, and he has been tipped as a future winner of the Nobel prize for literature.