Başak Demirtaş


Başak Demirtaş is a Kurdish-Turkish teacher, author, and the wife of Selahattin Demirtaş, the former leader of the Peoples' Democratic Party, who she has been campaigning to get released from prison since 2016.

Life

Başak was born and grew up in the Sur district of Diyarbakır.
She is a published academic, having written journal articles about breastfeeding in Turkey.
Talking about her husband's arrest by Turkish authorities in 2016, she told Cumhuriyet that it had reminded her of her own childhood: "They took my dad away in 1982. We were in Diyarbakır and the police also came in the middle of the night."
Başak Demirtaş travels regularly from Diyarbakır to Edirne in Turkey's North West to visit her husband. She told the BBC that she tried to be her husband's voice outside the prison during the 2018 Turkish Presidential election, in which he competed as the candidate for the HDP. On 6 June 2018, Selahattin Demirtaş made a campaign speech through his wife's phone from prison.
She met with the EU Rapporteur Kati Piri in 2018 to advocate for her husband's release. During the COVID-19 pandemic she campaigned for the inclusion of the political prisoners into a law which would release thousands of prisoners. In June 2020, she was the target of a sexual threat from a twitter account, which lead to a wave of solidarity from human rights activists and female politicians.

Family

She married Selahattin Demirtaş in 2002. They have two daughters.