Nurcan Baysal
(Kurdish region of Turkey)

Nurcan Baysal is a Kurdish human rights defender and journalist from Diyarbakir, in the Kurdish region of Turkey. As a direct result of her human rights work documenting human rights violations in the region, Baysal has attracted the enmity of nationalists and pro-government groups and individuals. She receives death threats and abusive messages via email, social media and telephone messages on a daily basis. In January 2018 she was detained in connection with her tweets calling for peace and condemning the Turkish government’s military incursion in Afrin and in February 2018, in a separate case, she was found guilty of demeaning the Turkish security forces in an article that she wrote in 2016 criticising the Turkish military operation in the Kurdish town of Cizre. Sentenced to a 10 month jail term, she was released on the condition that she not repeat the offence within five years.