"Leyla Zana was the first in a long line of Kurdish women jailed by the Turkish state for their involvement in the Kurdish political struggle for justice and equality, in the early 1990s, after she spoke Kurdish when she took her parliamentary oath, wearing a hairband in the Kurdish colours: green, red and yellow. While she was deservedly awarded the Sakharov Prize by the European Parliament in 1995, the women who followed in her footsteps receive nothing but a deafening silence from Europe."