Human rights defender

• 1. Introduction

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  Human rights defenders are ordinary people doing extraordinary, and often dangerous, work. They are teachers, lawyers, journalists, trade unionists, and indigenous community members. They are individuals who decide, sometimes alone, to stand between an injustice and the people it harms. In 2020, at least 331 of them were murdered across 25 countries. That number, published by Front Line Defenders, captures only the killings. For every death, there may be as many as a hundred cases of detention, eviction, defamation, or physical attack that never make the count. Who are these people? What makes their work so threatening to so many powerful actors? And what, if anything, has the world built to protect them?

• 2. Defining the Defender

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  Before 1998, no internationally agreed name existed for people doing this kind of work. Activist, monitor, or worker were the common terms. That changed on the 9th of December 1998, when the United Nations General Assembly adopted a document with a long formal title, abbreviated in practice to the Declaration on Human Rights Defenders. The Declaration created a deliberately broad definition: anyone who promotes or defends human rights qualifies, whether acting professionally or as a volunteer, alone or within an institution.

  In 2004, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights issued Fact Sheet 29 to elaborate on this definition. Its core statement was precise: no formal qualification is required to be a human rights defender. The two minimum standards are acceptance of the universality of human rights and commitment to non-violent action.

  This breadth is both a strength and a complication. Donors and protection programs seeking to identify who most needs support can struggle when the definition is wide enough to include nearly anyone acting for human rights. Researchers have responded by trying to categorise defenders by activity type, whether professional or informal, and by the specific rights at stake, such as women's rights or indigenous land rights. These distinctions have practical consequences for how risk patterns are understood.

• 3. Who Faces the Greatest Danger

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  Environmental human rights defenders carry a disproportionate share of the risk. In 2020-69 percent of all HRDs killed globally were working on environmental, land, or indigenous rights issues. Global Witness tracked the deaths of 1,922 environmental defenders across 52 countries between 2002 and 2019; 80 percent of those deaths occurred in Latin America.

  Indigenous people appear through these statistics with particular urgency. Although indigenous people account for roughly 6 percent of the global population, they made up approximately one-third of the HRDs murdered in 2020. A similar proportion held for environmental defenders killed between 2015 and 2019.

  Women human rights defenders face a distinct set of risks compounded by gender. Those who challenge cultural norms around gender face greater repression than other defenders, and this is especially sharp for less prominent workers in remote areas. In 2017, female activists killed for their advocacy were honored during the International Women Human Rights Defenders' Day. The cases documented involved women who had been criticizing corruption, protecting land from governments and corporations, and defending the rights of lesbian, gay, and transgender individuals.

  The Business and Human Rights Resource Center tracked a 34 percent increase in attacks against human rights activists worldwide in 2017. That year recorded 388 attacks, compared to 290 in 2016. The 2017 figures included 120 suspected murders. Defenders connected to agribusiness, mining, and renewable energy sectors faced the highest danger, alongside lawyers and members of environmental groups.

• 4. What the UN Declaration Protects

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  The Declaration on Human Rights Defenders is not a treaty and carries no legal binding force. What it does is take rights already established in existing human rights treaties and apply them specifically to the situation of defenders, making those rights easier to invoke.

  The rights the Declaration articulates cover a wide range of activities. Defenders are affirmed to have the right to develop and discuss new human rights ideas. They have the right to criticise government bodies and to propose improvements to how those bodies function. They have the right to provide legal assistance to others, to observe fair trials, and to communicate freely with non-governmental and intergovernmental organisations. The Declaration also protects the right to access resources for human rights work, including the receipt of funds from abroad.

  The Declaration places primary responsibility on states, which are expected to implement its provisions and protect defenders from violence and intimidation arising from their work. It also extends that responsibility to individuals in public service, and in professions such as medicine and law enforcement, whose roles may directly affect human rights in practice.

• 5. Building a Protection Architecture

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  After 1998, a series of institutional mechanisms followed the Declaration, each aimed at giving defenders a concrete channel to seek protection. The United Nations established the mandate of the Special Rapporteur on human rights defenders in 2000. The African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights created a parallel Special Rapporteur mandate in 2004. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights established a dedicated Human Rights Defenders Unit in 2001.

  At the regional level, the European Union issued guidelines on human rights defenders in 2004, and in 2015 launched a mechanism called ProtectDefenders.eu, implemented by civil society organisations. The Council of Europe adopted its own ministerial declaration on the subject in 2008.

  In 2008, the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders, a joint programme of the International Federation for Human Rights and the World Organisation Against Torture, convened all the major mandate-holders for the first time to find ways to coordinate their work. Two years later, in 2010, a single inter-mechanisms website went live to centralise public information about the activities of each body, including country visits, press releases, and trials observed.

  National-level legislation has also developed, though unevenly. Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, and Guatemala are among the countries that have introduced laws or policies specifically to protect human rights defenders. In 2016, the International Service for Human Rights published the Model National Law on the Recognition and Protection of Human Rights Defenders, developed in collaboration with hundreds of defenders and endorsed by leading human rights jurists, to give states an authoritative template for implementation.

• 6. Recognition and Awards

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  Several awards have been established specifically to recognise human rights defenders, and the dates of their founding mark the trajectory of how the field has grown.

  The Martin Ennals Award, a collaboration among several human rights non-governmental organisations, is named after a person who served as secretary general of Amnesty International. Its secretariat is housed at the World Organisation Against Torture office in Geneva. The award carries a grant of at least 20,000 Swiss Francs, roughly equivalent to 20,000 US dollars, for use in continued human rights work.

  The Sakharov Prize was established by the European Parliament in 1988. Its laureates have included Nelson Mandela, Malala Yousafzai, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, and Raif Badawi. The Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award dates to 1984. The Nuremberg International Human Rights Award, established by the city of Nuremberg, made its inaugural award in 1995.

  The Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to several human rights defenders. Liu Xiaobo, a Chinese activist who was imprisoned, received the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China. The Cao Shunli Memorial Award, first given in 2015, is named after Chinese lawyer and activist Cao Shunli and is awarded by Chinese Human Rights Defenders.

  The Ginetta Sagan Award for Women Human Rights Defenders was established in 1997 to help women around the world in their struggle to overcome oppression. Its past recipients include Hina Jilani, Sonia Pierre, Lydia Cacho, and Julienne Lusenge. In 2017, Crimean Tatar lawyer Emil Kurbedinov won the Award for Frontline Human Rights Defenders at Risk. That same January, Kurbedinov had been arrested by the Crimean Center for Counteracting Extremism, taken to a facility of the Russian Federal Security Service, found guilty of propaganda work for terrorist groups, and sentenced to ten days in prison.