Hatip Dicle

In 2014 he was released from prison and elected as Co-Chair of the Democratic Society Congress. He was succeeded in 2017 by Berdan Öztürk.

In the June 2011 parliamentary elections he ran as an independent candidate for the Diyarbakir Province, supported by the Labour, Democracy and Freedom Block. He was elected with 78.220 votes. However, after the election, Turkey's Supreme Election Board (YSK) annulled his election, because of his former conviction on a terrorist charge. His fellow MPs reacted by boycotting the Parliament. He was replaced in the Turkish Parliament by a member of the AK Party, Oya Eronat, who had come sixth in the election, with a much smaller vote.

Dicle was again arrested in December 2009 as part of the KCK investigation.

He was sentenced to 20 months in prison for a statement that he made to the ANKA agency in 2007 about the Kurdish question. This was interpreted by the Ankara 11th High Criminal Court as siding with terrorism, although other commentators have pointed out that the statement was advocating a peaceful solution and that the sentence is evidence of Turkey's curbs on freedom of expression.

He was one of the first Co-Chairs of the Democratic Society Congress after its foundation in 2007 until 2010.

On 9 June 2004, the 3 prisoners were released after a retrial and pressure from the European Union, but Dicle was still banned from political activity.

On 2 March 1994, Parliament lifted the immunity of Dicle and he was arrested. On 8 August 1994 he was convicted, together with Leyla Zana, Orhan Doğan and Selim Sadak of membership in an organization (Kurdistan Workers' Party) and sentenced to 15 years in prison. In June 1994 also the Democracy Party was banned.

In 1991 he was elected to the parliament within a political alliance of the Social Democratic Populist Party (SHP) and the HEP. In 1993, the HEP was banned. In anticipation of the ban, the Kurdish politicians had already set up the Democracy Party (Demokrasi Partisi, or DEP). On 12 December 1993, Dicle was elected party chairman, but was relieved of his duties as chairman in March 1994.

Dicle grew up in a family with islamic values. He attended the Ziya Gökalp high school in Diyarbakir and enrolled into civil engineering department of the Istanbul Technical University from which he graduated in 1979. He began his political activity in the 1970s, involving himself in the Revolutionary Cultural Eastern Hearths (DDKO) and joining the People's Labor Party (HEP) (Halkin Emek Partisi, working party of the people). In the late 1980s he travelled to Palestine where he joined the Fatah and received military training.

Mehmet Hatip Dicle (born 1955, Diyarbakir, Turkey), is a Turkish politician, of Kurdish origin, of the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP).