Mithat Sancar

Mithat Sancar (born 1963 in Nusaybin) is a Turkish professor of public and constitutional law, columnist and translator. Since the June 2015 general election he is a member of the Turkish parliament for Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP).

Early life and academic career

Born 1963 in Nusaybin, Sancar attended high school in Diyarbakır before going to Ankara University, where he graduated majoring in public law. In 1995, following his graduation, he received his Ph.D. in constitutional law with a thesis on the "Interpretation of Basic Rights" (Turkish: Temel Hakların Yorumu).

Since 1999, he has been a lecturer and since 2007 a full professor at Ankara University. Together with fellow scholar Tanıl Bora (de), he translated Jürgen Habermas' first major work "Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit" into the Turkish language.

Political activism

Mithat Sancar is one of the founders of the Ankara-based Human Rights Foundation (TİHV, est. 1990) and the Institute of Human Rights (tr) (TİHAK, est. 1999). Between 1998 and 2003, Sancar and his colleague Tanıl Bora organized the Human Rights Association's (İHD) annual conference on the Human rights movement in Turkey.

Since 2007, he has been a columnist for the leftist BirGün newspaper.

Parliamentary career

Ahead of the June 2015 general election, Sancar was asked by HDP leader Selahattin Demirtaş, one of his former students, to run for parliament. After some hesitation, he agreed to suspend his academic career in order to help the HDP over the 10% threshold. Heading the party's electoral list in the Mardin constituency, he was elected a member of the Grand National Assembly. In the subsequent November 2015 snap election, he was reelected.

In November 2015, Sancar and Erol Dora joined fellow MPs Gülser Yıldırım and Ali Atalan in their hunger strike to protest the ongoing state of exception curfew in the border town of Nusaybin, where since November 13 and under the pretext of operating against militant YDG-H members, 70% of the neighborhoods have been cut from electricity, 30% from water supply.

Personal life

Sancar is the cousin of the laureate of the 2015 Nobel prize in Chemistry, Aziz Sancar.

Sancar considers Arabic his native language, while Kurdish was the language he spoke on the street. Besides these, he speaks Turkish, English and German.