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In this episode, MEI Director of the Turkey Program Gönül Tol spoke with Meral Danış Beştaş, a Turkish politician from the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), who has served as a Member of Parliament for Adana since 2015. This event was pre-recorded and can be viewed in Turkish with English subtitles. If you experience difficulties enabling the subtitles, please follow this link.
Established in July 2020, MEI’s Voices from Turkish Politics series is a forum for prominent figures in the Turkish political sphere. This speaking engagement is the fifth event in the series, which was preceded by Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, head of the secularist Republican People’s Party and leader of the main opposition in Turkey since 2010, Dr. Nazir Cihangir Islam, a member of the Turkish Parliament, Temel Karamollaoğlu, chair of the Islamist Felicity Party, and H.E. Ahmet Davutoğlu, former Foreign Minister and Prime Minister of Turkey. For more information and upcoming events in this series, please subscribe to our event invitations.
Speaker biography:
Meral Danış Beştaş is a Turkish politician from the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), who has served as a Member of Parliament for Adana since 2015. Beştaş is a lawyer and advocate for human rights. Throughout her career, Beştaş has served as director of Amnesty International’s Turkey branch, director and deputy chairman at the Board of Diyarbakır Bar for two terms, and director of Consultation and Application Center on Women Rights for over three terms. She has served as an applicant lawyer in cases about women and human rights violations at the European Court of Human Rights.