A Feminist Discussion on the “Human Rights Defender” Paradigm in Turkey

These three short reports, published in scope of Hafıza Merkezi Berlin’s project “Defending Others, Liberating Themselves: Women Human Rights Defenders’ Experiences in Turkey”, are the product of a long-term research aiming to analyze the gendered structure of civil society and the struggle for human rights in Turkey, and the gendered experiences of the actors in the field from a feminist perspective. The common concern of these three reports is to expose the latent gendered structure of this field, which is often defined as an undisputed “safe space”, and to depict the experiences of women, queer, and non-binary subjects in the sphere. By approaching this issue from different angles, these reports aim to make a modest contribution to the gendering of human rights and to the empowerment of women, queer, and non-binary civil society actors in Turkey.