Mithat Sancar (born 1963) is a Turkish professor of public and constitutional law, columnist and translator of Arab descent. He has been an MP for the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) in the Turkish parliament since the June 2015 general election and was elected Co-Chair of the party in February 2020

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).

From 1985-1990, he was employed as a research assistant in the Faculty of Law of the Dicle University. 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. He also wrote for the newspapers Taraf.

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 and in the General Election 2018 he was reelected. He is currently a Deputy Speaker of the Grand National Assembly.

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.[

On 23 February 2020, Sancar was elected Co-Chair of the Peoples' Democratic Party along with Pervin Buldan who was re-elected.

Legal prosecution

According to an interview he gave Sancar was accused of having insulted the President for having declared the Turkish government was in part responsible for the terrorist attack against a HDP rally in Ankara and for having also said to the authorities that a conflict should be prevented in Cizre. Then he is also prosecuted for Propaganda for the PKK because he has supported the opening of Kurdish schools. The State Prosecutor at the Court of Cassation in Turkey Bekir Şahin filed a lawsuit before the Constitutional Court on the 17 March 2021, demanding for Sancar and 686 other HDP politicians a five-year ban for political activities. The lawsuit was filed jointly with a request for the HDP to be shut down due to the parties alleged organizational links with the PKK.

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. [1]

Books

Devlet Aklı” Kıskacında Hukuk Devleti (2000)

Mülteciler veİltica Hakkı (2002, co-authored by Bülent Peker)

Geçmişle Hesaplaşma - Unutma Kültüründen Hatırlama Kültürüne (2007)