Veli Sirin German Director, Center for Islamic Pluralism
Veli Sirin is a leader of the Alevi Islamic youth movement in Germany, composed of Germans of Turkish and Kurdish ethnic origin who adhere to secular politics, and other contemporary values, and oppose the encroachment of fundamentalism in Turkish governance. They make up at least 20% of the population of Turkey.
Sirin, a Director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism in Germany, participated in the 2009 panel sponsored by the Hudson Institute, New York, on the Durban Review at the United Nations in Geneva. He was also a contributor, for Germany, to that year's publication by the Center for Islamic Pluralism of A Guide to Shariah Law and Islamist Ideology in Western Europe, 2007-09, an extensive study of Shariah agitation, at www.islamicpluralism.org, and posted at www.islamicpluralism.de
Bahareh Hedayat is a human rights activist who has spent over six years in an Iranian prison for "insulting" Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and for "actions against national security, propagation of falsehoods, mutiny and illegal congregation." Hedayat is the longest serving female prisoner of conscience in Iran.
