Türkiye

Ankara – June 25, 2018. A total of 103 women deputies have been elected to the 600-seat Turkey Parliament in the June 24 poll, according to unofficial data compiled from results provided by the state-run Anadolu Agency.

In the June 2015 and November 2015 elections, 97 and 81 female deputies were elected to the 550-seat parliament respectively, corresponding to 17.6 percent and 14.7 percent of all lawmakers in the national assembly.

A total of 904 women from seven political parties are running to become parliamentarians in the June 24 elections, a record in the Republic's history. The number constitutes to 21.5 percent of all candidates running for Parliament. Monday was the last day for political parties to deliver their final list of parliamentary candidates to the Supreme Election Board (YSK) for the elections. The anticipation for the lists was sky-high.

Main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu on Aug. 27 called on women and young people to get more involved in politics, on the second day of the ongoing “justice congress” in the northwestern Turkish province of Çanakkale. 

The Syrian civil war has produced a catalogue of horrors – cities bombed into rubble, the rise of ISIS, refugees fleeing across open seas on makeshift rafts– that have been widely covered in the Western media.

Turkey’s performance in implementing the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) was reviewed by a United Nations committee on July 13, as a Turkish delegation provided official figures and answered the committee’s questions on a wide range of women’s issues in the country. 

Judith Prat, documentary photographer, has recently published an article on the sustained political struggle of Kurdish women. The article builds upon an interview with Cemile Akgun (vid. Photo) from the association “Mothers for Peace”. After the attack the Turkish army in 1994, which destroyed the town of Dersim, where they resided, Cemile and her family were obliged to flee to Istanbul.

The People’s Democracy Party (HDP) has co-chairs for all representative levels. A female and male official share the responsibility. The party is chaired by Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yuksekdag. The HDP has become the fastest-growing political movement in Turkey since the August 2014 election.