Akın Birdal
Akın Birdal (* 1948 in Niğde Province , Turkey ) is a Turkish agricultural engineer and human rights activist . Birdal was a member of the Barış ve Demokrasi Partisi in the Turkish parliament from 2007 to 2011 . He is co-founder of the Turkish human rights organization İnsan Hakları Derneği .
Life
After attending the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences at the University of Ankara, he initially worked as a garden architect in 1970 . In 1973 he completed his PhD in management.
Until 1977 he held managerial positions in the Union of Agricultural Engineers and in the Chamber of Agricultural Engineers. From 1977 he intensified his activities for village development within his native province. In 1979 he was appointed university lecturer, but had to give up his position again after the military coup in 1980 , as he had been sentenced to one year in prison for his work in the village cooperatives.
In 1986 Birdal co-founded what is now the largest human rights association in Turkey, İnsan Hakları Derneği , of which he was initially general secretary and then president from 1992. In this capacity he also campaigned for the improvement of the situation of the citizens of Kurdish origin in Turkey .
In 1995 the human rights activist took part in the establishment of the Turkish Özgürlük ve Dayanışma Partisi ( Party for Freedom and Solidarity ), which, however, failed to make it into the Turkish parliament. On May 12, 1998, Birdal was seriously injured in an assassination attempt with a nationalist background. A speech in 1996 earned him 14 months in prison for “separatist propaganda”.
In the new millennium, Birdal tried - he had since given up the IHD chairmanship - to participate in an organized association of left-wing Turks and Kurds.
In the elections in Turkey in 2007 , the ethnic Turk ran as an independent candidate in the Kurdish city of Diyarbakır and was elected. Then Birdal joined the Democracy Toplum Partisi . After the ban on DTP on December 11, 2009, he joined the Barış ve Demokrasi Partisi . He ran as an independent candidate for Gaziantep for the parliamentary elections in June 2011 , but did not get enough votes to return to parliament.
Books
Akın Birdal was also the author of several books:
- Sol Elim - Ulucanlardan Notlar , Verlag Belge, 2002
- Betula: Öyküler , Aykırı Publishing House, 2004
- Cansuyu: Deneme ve köşe yazıları , Belge Publishing House, 2003 and Aykırı Publishing House, 2006
International awards
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Tüm hakları saklıdır: Turkey: Defend Human Rights Defenders
- ↑ , The High Electoral Council (YSK) ( Memento of the original from July 21, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed August 28, 2007
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Birdal, Akın |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Turkish agricultural engineer and human rights activist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1948 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Niğde Province , Turkey |