Soyop – Young Pioneers Society

Soyop – Young Pioneers Society is a group of young people who gathered together in order to create a better world on the basis of universal values of human rights by promoting democracy and dialogue in Turkey. In order to achieve our aims, we attach a special importance to dialogue among various social groups as we believe that democracy and justice can be fully ensured only in the societies where diversity is considered as the source of abundance.

Based on those ideas, Soyop has been founded in youth field with the diverse participation of young people who have different social, cultural, political, ethnical, educational backgrounds and a wide range of interests. Most of the members of Soyop are undergraduate students at various subjects such as law, medicine, architecture, sociology, engineering etc.; however, there are also some members who study at high school level and are going to build the future of our organization by ensuring continuity of our works.

Turkey is dramatically one of those countries frequently being accused of violating human rights by European Court of Human Rights. Despite this reality, the number of NGOs working in human rights field is quite limited. As being an NGO advocating human rights, we firstly want to attract attention and raise consciousness regarding violations of human rights because we know that if people are not aware of their fundamental rights, the governments will be more likely to ignore those rights.

In conclusion, based on a fact that people of Turkey are not well-educated about this issue in similar to many countries in the world, we try to increase the number of people who have the basic notion of human rights. By doing that, as we are especially dealing with young people and cooperating with NGOs from the entire world, we mostly use informal ways of learning.

Main activities of our group are based on international youth exchanges which are generally supported by inter-governmental organizations like European Union. In the concrete, by now, we implemented 11 youth projects with the participation of more than 69 young people from Soyop in the various countries of Europe including Bulgaria, Belgium, Latvia, Romania, Estonia, Poland, France, Italy, Bosnia and Herzegovina; and by this way, we give to young people an opportunity to understand different applications of human rights in a multicultural, informal and educational environment. As another significant example, we also hosted about 35 young people from 5 European countries consisting of Turkey, Croatia, France, Italy and Romania in Istanbul within a youth exchange about the xenophobia by considering multi-ethnical dimension of the Istanbul city.

In a nutshell, this is the society of young pioneers: participate, enjoy, and do more!