Hülya Dinçer is a human rights lawyer and scholar from Turkey. She holds a master degree from Paris Panthéon Sorbonne University and a PhD in human rights law from Galatasaray University. She worked in the Human Rights Department of Marmara University as a teaching and research assistant from 2011 to 2017. Between 2018–2019 she was a post-doctoral researcher at Institut of Political Sciences of Ecole Normal Supérieure Paris-Saclay in France.
Hülya has been involved in the human rights movement and collaborated with NGOs involved in the fight against impunity in Turkey such as the Center of Memory, Truth and Justice. She has also conducted research at CELS, an Argentinian NGO fighting for accountability and truth-recovery during her stay in Buenos Aires between 2013–2014 as a visiting researcher. Her research focuses on transitional justice, collective memory and law, peace building, and accountability mechanisms. She is currently a postdoc researcher at the Truth Justice Memory Center (Hafıza Merkezi) in Istanbul, Turkey.
The Politics of Impunity in Turkey: Actors, Temporalities, and Counter-Strategies
Dinçer’s current research project aims to explore the continuities and discontinuities in the legal politics of impunity in Turkey through an analysis of the mechanisms and strategies employed in the past three decades, with a particular focus on the transformation of legal institutions and techniques during the recent authoritarian turn marked by the nation-wide state of emergency declared in 2016. The study seeks to understand how the actors and strategies that took part in shielding the perpetrators from prosecution have evolved over the time, and by which counter-strategies opposing actors have responded to these politics in their struggle for accountability.
The research methodology is based on fieldwork that includes an analysis of the judicial practice in the selected case-law, along with the changing governmental strategies and tools to ensure impunity and a study of the legal and extra-legal activities of civil society actors and human rights defenders in Turkey through in-depth interviews with the lawyers and representatives of legal and human rights organizations. The project will help to understand how actors and mechanisms of politics of impunity transformed over the last three decades. It will also unravel the evolving counter-strategies of civil society and legal actors in their fight for justice and accountability, particularly in the face of a massive crackdown on political dissent.
