SUndergoing legal proceedings that have lasted twenty-four years, our colleague Pinar Selek, sociologist, teacher-researcher at the University of the Côte d’Azur (UCA), is faced with a decision by the Supreme Court of Turkey which rendered, on June 21, 2022, a judgment quashing his acquittal; an iniquitous decision that will enforce a life sentence.
At the end of the 1990s, a student at Istanbul University, Pinar Selek worked on the treatment of minorities in Turkey. Arrested in July 1998, she was tortured and imprisoned for more than two years for having refused to give the names of Kurdish activists whom she had interviewed as part of her sociological research. Officially, Pinar Selek is accused of having committed an attack on an Istanbul market. This accusation was nullified by several expert reports which showed that the explosion had been caused by a gas leak. In addition, the only witness who accused him admitted having given a false statement under the duress of torture.
Pinar Selek was acquitted four times in 2006, 2008, 2011 and 2014 of the charges against her. Exiled in France since the end of 2011, the sociologist defended her doctoral thesis at the University of Strasbourg, which granted him academic protection. She was then welcomed to the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Lyon where she was made honorary doctor causedthen at UCA, first on the National Program for the Emergency Reception of Scientists in Exile (Pause), with the support of the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation, the Research Institute for Development and CNRS, then as associate researcher.
Committed researcher
Now a teacher-researcher at this university, she teaches sociology there and conducts research on migrations at the migrations and society research unit (Urmis). Pinar Selek was granted refugee status in 2013 and received French nationality in 2017.
A researcher committed to the rights of individuals and national, religious, sexual and political minorities, Pinar Selek faces this ordeal with courage and dignity that command admiration. We express our full solidarity with her in the face of the injustice and persecution of which she has been the victim for more than twenty years. As is often the case in political trials in authoritarian regimes, the prosecution against Pinar Selek was based on charges that are not based on any serious element.
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