Pınar SELEK

Sociologist, feminist, writer, and PEN Türkiye member Pınar Selek continued to face a decades-long trial over a 1998 explosion that killed seven and injured 100 in the Istanbul Spice Bazaar. Arrested in July 1998, Selek spent over two years in prison, where she said she suffered torture and other ill-treatment. Selek has been acquitted of all charges four times – in 2006, 2008, 2011 and 2014 – due to expert witnesses testifying that the cause of the explosion was a gas leak not a bomb, yet courts ordered retrials after each of these acquittals. Her fourth trial resulted in a conviction in January 2013 when Selek was handed an aggravated life sentence, although this conviction was overturned by Türkiye’s Supreme Court of Appeals on 11 June 2014 on procedural grounds. The 15th High Criminal Court in Istanbul subsequently acquitted her of all charges on 19 December 2014.  

On 21 June 2022, the Turkish Supreme Court overturned Selek’s fourth acquittal. Her retrial before the Istanbul Criminal Court which opened on 31 March 2023 has been postponed several times and was ongoing at the end of the year. She is the subject of an international arrest warrant. PEN International believes that her prosecution is linked to her work as a sociologist researching Kurdish communities in the mid-to-late 1990s, and that she is being pursued through the courts as a means of penalising her for her legitimate research and commentary. At the time of her arrest, Selek had been working on an oral history of the banned Kurdistan’s Workers Party (PKK) and talking to some PKK members to find out why they had chosen armed violence. Selek reported being tortured under investigation, in an attempt to coerce her into divulging the names of individuals she had interviewed as part of her research (see Case Lists 2012-2014 and 2022-2023/2024).  

Pınar Selek, born on 8 October 1971, is a dual national French-Turkish sociologist, feminist, writer, and member of PEN Türkiye. She has written extensively about the plight of women, the poor, street children, the LGBTQI community and the Kurds in Türkiye. She is one of the founding editors of Amargi, a Turkish feminist journal. Her latest book Le Chaudron Militaire Turc (The Military Cauldron) was published in August 2023. She has been living in France since 2012.