Tahir Elçi

Life and professional legacy

He was born in 1966 in the Cizre district of Şırnak. He completed his primary, secondary and high school education in Cizre, and graduated from Dicle University Faculty of Law in 1991. From 1992 he practised law independently in Diyarbakır; between 1998 and 2006 he held executive posts at the Diyarbakır Bar Association. Alongside the presidency of the Diyarbakır Bar Association, he also served on the Academic Advisory Board of the Human Rights Centre of the Union of Turkish Bar Associations. Married to Türkan Elçi and a father of two, he studied international criminal law and criminal procedure at the Academy of European Law (ERA) in Germany, and took part as a speaker and presented papers at many national and international meetings and conferences. From 1998 onwards he gave seminars on criminal law and human rights law in traineeship and continuing legal education programmes. He was a founding board member of the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey (TİHV) and took part in the establishment and work of many civil society organisations. A member of the Human Rights Association (İHD), Elçi represented victims in the extrajudicial killings, unsolved murders and village burning cases of the 1990s, while also continuing his work on rights violations in Diyarbakır and the wider region. He acted as a rights defender in many cases, among them the Lice case, the Temizöz case, the bombing of the villages of Kuşkonar and Koçağılı, and the Roboski massacre. When he was elected President at the 43rd Ordinary General Assembly of the Diyarbakır Bar Association, he said that "an honourable and difficult duty and a heavy agenda" awaited him.