[2] In 1991 Zana was elected to the Grand National Assembly of Turkey on behalf of the Social Democratic People's Party (SHP).

[6]In 1998 her sentence was extended because of a letter she had written[11] that was published in a Kurdish newspaper, which allegedly expressed banned pro-separatist views.

[13] On the 9 June 2004, after a prosecutor requested quashing the prior verdict on a technicality, the High Court of Appeals ordered Zana and the other defendants be released.

[16] In April 2008, Zana was sentenced to two years in prison by Turkish authorities for allegedly "spreading terrorist propaganda" by saying in a speech that Kurds have three leaders, as which she named Massoud Barzani, Celal Talebanî and Abdullah Öcalan".

[20] Leyla Zana released the following statement to the EUTCC: “The case against me is a violation against freedom of thought, and represents a threat to every Kurd in Turkey.

The mentality governing this country is that problems can be resolved by anti democratic and repressive means and that unfair trial can provide political and social peace.

[20] On 28 July 2009, a Court in Diyarbakır sentenced Leyla Zana to 15 months in prison because of a speech she had made at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) of the University of London for remarks on Abdullah Öcalan.

[citation needed] While this decision forbids them to be members of political parties, it does not prevent them from being elected to the parliament as independent deputies.

She was re-elected to Parliament in the 12 June 2011,[24] and on 1 July 2012, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan met Leyla Zana in his office.

This meeting took place after a recent Hürriyet interview in which Leyla Zana said she was hopeful that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan would solve the Kurdish–Turkish conflict.

[30] In July 2017, Zana's HDP deputy seat was under AKP-lead parliamentary review and potential exclusion for "failing to properly take her oath of office, as well as rampant absenteeism".

[32][33][34] On the 17 March 2021, the state prosecutor to the Court of Cassation Bekir Şahin filed a lawsuit to the Constitutional Court which demanded for her and 686 other HDP politicians a five-year ban for a political participation together with a closure of the HDP due to their alleged organizational links to the PKK.