Selma Irmak

Selma Irmak (born 8 March 1971, Kızıltepe, Mardin Province, Turkey), is a Kurdish MP of the Peace and Democracy Party, representing the city of Şırnak. Elected to the parliament in the June 2011 general election, she was one of five MPs who were elected directly from prison and who were unable to take up their seats.

In the 1990s, she spent almost ten years in prison on charges of membership of the PKK.

She was for several years a co-chair of the Democratic Society Party. In October 2008, she was sentenced to six months' imprisonment for praising crimes and criminals. The court sentence was later commuted to a fine of 5,000 Turkish lira.

She stood for mayor for Derik in the 29 March 2009 local elections. On 18 April 2009, while still co-chair of the DTP, she was again arrested, in a police operation in Mardin, and detained in Diyarbakır E Type Prison on charges of membership of a terrorist organization. DTP members presented the large-scale arrests of April 2009 as a government response to the strong showing that their party had made in the March 2009 local elections.

She is being tried alongside 175 other Kurdish politicians and political activists in the so-called mass 'KCK trial', which began in October 2010, and as of January 2014, is still ongoing.

In February 2012, she went on hunger strike along with many other fellow detainees and released a statement of support for Ocalan.

She was freed on 4 January 2014, by decision of the Diyarbakir High Criminal Court. Her release came shortly after a landmark decision of the Turkish Constitutional Court in the case of Mustafa Balbay She took her oath in the Turkish parliament on 7 January 2014.

The Turkish Parliament biographical file of Ms Irmak is brief, listing her as a high-school graduate and single person. It was while she was studying to be a teacher at the Konya based Selçuk University that she was first arrested.

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