Hişyar Özsoy

Hişyar Özsoy (born 26 June 1977, Yeniköy, Bingöl) is a Turkish politician and academic of Kurdish descent. He is a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) for the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP)

Education and academic career Özsoy graduated with a bachelor's degree in sociology from Boğaziçi University in 2002 and earned a master's degree in 2004 and a Ph.D in Political Anthropology 2010, both from the University of Texas in Austin.

Political career Özsoy began his political career working as a coordinator of foreign relations and a political consultant for the municipality in Diyarbakır between 2005 and 2008. and re-elected in the snap election in November 2015. He was a candidate for the mayorship in Bingöl in the local elections of March 2019, but was not elected. Özsoy has been elected into several international bodies. Since 2015 he is a member of the parliamentary group of the Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe (OSCE).

Since November 27, 2015 has been a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), since May 30, 2016 member of the United Left of Europe - Nordic Green Left (GUE/NGL) group and on January 21, 2019 he became the vice president of the GUE/NGL. In 2018 he was sent to the Parliamentary Assembly of the NATO. Additionally, Özsoy is a member of the board of the Progressive Alliance since November 2019.

Political positions Özsoy is the HDP vice-co chair for foreign politics since 2016. While in 2021 he was also celebrating the HDP's eight anniversary, he also contended the party was part of a longer tradition of several struggling identities in Turkey.