He graduated from the Faculty of Political Science at Ankara University in 1962. He performed his military service in Bitlis. In Şemdinli and Yüksekova he had the chance to closely observe the life of the Kurdish people. Following the completion of his military service, he worked as a civil servant in Tunceli for a short period of time. In 1965, he started his PhD studies on the social structure of the Alikan Tribe. During the field study, he lived with the nomadic Kurdish tribe for 7 months. He was arrested soon after the 12 March 1971 military coup d’état and was sent to the Diyarbakır Military Prison. He has been imprisoned eight times in all, and in total has spent 17 years of his life behind bars. He was released following the legal restructuring of 1999. He has published 36 books on the Kurdish issue, 32 of which have faced various bans in Turkey.

Despite facing oppression and persecution from the status quo, he became the voice of truth and took great risk for what he believed was right at a time when the word “Kurdish” could not be pronounced in daily life, and even the existence of the Kurdish people was denied. Since the day he understood the social and political character of the Kurdish Issue, he has been tirelessly seeking a solution. Throughout his life, he has been subjected to torture, threats and maltreatment, however he refuses to be silenced, and continues his work. So that society can confront its problems, he carries out his research, he writes books, he sustains the struggle, and he continues to transform. He received the 2012 International Hrant Dink Award.

It was born in 1989 in Tbilisi, amidst protests to a police raid that led to deaths. In 1991, it became institutionalized to work on human rights issues, and focus on historical research and education. Work began to systematically collect evidence of state terrorism. The aim was to reveal crimes the Soviet government had committed and concealed. Documents and memoirs were collected in many cities, oral testimonies were transcribed, and reconnaissance missions were carried out to gulags. Tens of thousands of people provided them with the documents they possessed. A substantial archive on the era of repression was formed. They believe that ‘forgetting tragic events of the past is tantamount to abandoning your own memory’, adding that ‘a society without memory will submit to any demagogue; and in such a society people are mere cogs in the state machine.” More than 50 “Books of Memory” and lists of executed victims have been published. All the documents and printed material related to the era of repression has been brought together at their library in Moscow. Hundreds of artworks created by prisoners, bearing the traces of life at the camps have been exhibited at their museum. They continue their work at many former-Soviet states, under genuine danger and threats. They inaugurated an information movement that began with Nagorno-Karabagh and has continued in Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Moldovia, Tajikistan, Russia and Chechnya. Their office in Chechnya has been frequently raided by government officials. In 2009, Natalya Estemirova, an award-winning human rights activist, who was investigating the murder and abduction cases in the country, was herself abducted and later found murdered. The Society was forced to temporarily suspend its activities in the country in order not to risk the lives of their colleagues. They appeal to society at large to confront not only past human rights violations but also ongoing infringements. They draw attention to human rights violations that take place at zones of armed conflict and provide information to the public. They work for the rights of immigrants, refugees and asylum-seekers, and aim to transform migration services so that they protect not the interest of the state, but the rights of refugees. They received the 2012 International Hrant Dink Award. They are represented by Alexander Cherkasov, chair of the International “MEMORIAL” Society.

Political analyst and Director of the Yerevan-based Caucasus Institute. His areas of study are ethno political conflicts, post-Communist transformations and nation building in the former USSR in general and in the Caucasus in particular. Since the early 1990s, he has specialized on conflicts in the South and Northern Caucasus, elections in a transition setting, and the building of post-Soviet identities. He has also conducted and supervised research on migration, regional integration, media development and the formation of public discourses. Alexander also teaches Political Science and Caucasus Studies at the Caucasus Institute and other universities in Armenia.

He is a filmmaker born in Greece in 1933. Following his education in Paris, he settled in France. Costa Gavras was president of the Cinémathèque Française from 1982 to 1987, and again from 2007 to the present. Costa Gavras is known for merging controversial political issues with the entertainment value of commercial cinema. He is best known for films with overt political themes, most famously Z (1969). Law and justice, oppression, legal/illegal violence, and torture are common subjects in his work. In most cases, the targets of Gavras's work have been right-of-center movements and regimes.

He got his graduate degree in the field of international economics at Ankara University Political Science Faculty where he also taught between 1977 and 1980. In 1995-96, he took part in the New Democracy Movement. In 1997, he started to work in Radika Newspaper as a columnist. In 2000, he started to write for Yeni Binyıl newspaper for a while; in May 2001, he became a columnist in Zaman newspaper. Between 2007 and 2010, he was the editor-in-chief in Agos newspaper.

Born 1953, Nilüfer Göle is a prominent Turkish French sociologist and a leading authority on the political movement of today's educated, urbanized, religious Muslim women. From 1986 to 2001 a professor at the Bogazici University in Istanbul, she is currently Directrice d'études at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), Centre d’Analyse et d’Intervention Sociologiques (CADIS), in Paris. Göle is the author of Interpénétrations: L’Islam et l’Europe and The Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling. Through personal interviews, Göle has developed detailed case studies of young Turkish women who are turning to the tenets of fundamental Islamic gender codes.

Well-known through his activities as political writer, blogger and columnist, Timothy Garton Ash is also a historian focusing on communist dictatorships in Central and Eastern Europe. He has lived in Berlin for several years, which gave him the opportunity to travel behind the “iron curtain” and to improve his knowledge of the German language and culture. His work covers the topic of the transformation of the former Eastern Bloc after 1989. Ash has been an editorial writer on Central European Affairs for The London Times and a columnist on Foreign Affairs at The Independent. He currently contributes to different American newspapers and has a weekly column at The Guardian.

Rakel Dink became involved in human rights activism following the tragic assassination of her husband, the prominent Turkish-Armenian journalist and founder of Agos newspaper, Hrant Dink.

Born to an Armenian family in Silopi, southeastern Turkey, Rakel moved to Istanbul with tens of kids from Anatolia in order to receive education in Armenian Schools. She met with Hrant Dink at Camp Armen, where Armenian children orphans or those away from their families would spend their summers. Rakel and Hrant got married and became managers at Camp Armen in the following years until the property was seized by the state.

Following the death of Hrant Dink in January 2007, Rakel devoted her life to preserving her husband’s legacy. She established the Hrant Dink Foundation in 2007, with a mission to protect and uphold human rights in Turkey, preserve the identity and culture of minorities, address polarization, and normalize Turkish-Armenian relations. Rakel continues to be an optimist and maintains that despite the various challenges that she was forced to overcome throughout her life, she has been surrounded by love and kindness. She is hopeful for the future of Turkey and finds joy in her work and her family.