Sebahat Tuncel

Sebahat Tuncel (* July 5, 1975 in the province of Malatya Yazıhan ) is a Kurdish politician, women's rights activist, former nurse and deputies of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey.

Sebahat Tuncel was born in 1975 in Yazıhan daughter of Fahrettin and Meryem Tuncel in an Alevi family. She studied at the Mersin Üniversitesi cartography and land surveying. She began her political career in 1988 in the women's organization of the pro-Kurdish party HADEP. Sebahat Tuncel was a co-founder of Demokratik Toplum Partisi (DTP ) and a member of the Central Committee. Tuncel also worked for international organizations such as UNDP and Amnesty International.

In 2006, she was accused of several trips to the camps of the PKK to have taken in northern Iraq, and was tried and imprisoned in Gebze on suspicion of membership of the PKK. For the 2007 parliamentary elections Tuncel ran as an independent candidate for the province of Istanbul and won with 93,000 votes in the third election district of Istanbul. Then she was released from prison on 25 July 2007. This Tuncel is the only MPs who won an election from prison. She is also the youngest member in the history of Turkey. Tuncel is unmarried.

After the banning of the DTP on 11 December 2009 Tuncel joined the Barış ve at Demokrasi Partisi. For the general elections in June 2011 it stood as an independent candidate for Istanbul again and was re-elected.

In March 2013, she was sentenced by a court in Silopi to a fine of 25,000 Turkish lira because they should have given at the Newroz festivities in 2011 a police inspector in Şırnak a slap.

For the upcoming local elections in March 2014, the BDP deputies Tuncel, Ertuğrul Kürkçü and Sırrı Süreyya Önder decided to end October 2013 escape from the party and the Halkların Demokratik Partisi (HDP; Democratic Party of the Peoples) anzuschliesen. The idea behind the HDP was to achieve greater opportunities in the elections, because the " Kurdish party " BDP is unattractive to the west of the country. At the Congress of the HDP on 27 October in Ankara Tuncel was chosen along with Kürkçü to party chairman.