Support and Defend Women Human Rights Activists

The past two decades have seen women's organizations spring up around the world. Most of the advances which women have made towards claiming their rights have been the result of grass roots campaigning, usually by independent women's rights organizations. Some work for their "disappeared" relative or are community activists, fighting for basic economic and social rights such as freedom from want. Many are lawyers seeking justice for the underrepresented. They campaign against torture, domestic violence, equal treatment at work or for land rights and access to credit.

All of these women are human rights defenders.

This wave of courage, creativity and commitment has all too often met a wall of government indifference and sometimes government repression of the cruelest kind. Few governments recognize the work of women's human rights organizations as a legitimate exercise of fundamental civil and political rights.

Take Action

IRAN
Parvin Ardalan, winner of Olaf Palme Prize, harassed and prevented from receiving the prize.
Parvin Ardalan, a journalist and women’s rights defender, is facing imprisonment for her part in organizing a demonstration in June 2006 calling for an end to legal discrimination against women in Iran. She was briefly detained after the demonstration. In April 2007, she was convicted of acting against national security and sentenced to six months’ actual imprisonment, with an additional 30 months suspended for five years. She remains free pending her appeal.

CHINA
Mao Hengfeng,
a mother of twins, was dismissed from her job in 1988 because she became pregnant with her third child, in violation of China's family planning regulations. Currently, Mao Hengfeng is reportedly detained at Yangpu District Branch Police Station in Shanghai, where she is kept in solitary confinement.

COLOMBIA
Yolanda Becerra,
President of the Organización Femenina Popular (Popular Women?s Organization, OFP) in Colombia, was assaulted in her home in Barrancabermeja on 4 November 2007. Members of her family have been harassed and threatened as well.

GUATEMALA
Angélica González and Jennifer Echeverría,
are part of a team of lawyers at the Guatemalan human rights organization, Centro para la Acción Legal en Derechos Humanos (CALDH), or the Center for Legal Action of Human Rights. Due to their work, these women and their colleagues have been subject to a number of aggressions in recent days and recently received a message amounting to a death threat. Amnesty International believes their lives may be in grave danger.

MEXICO
Obtilia Eugenio Manuel,
indigenous rights activist and human rights defender, is being harassed and threatened in order to prevent her from carrying out important human rights work. She has highlighted abuses committed by the military in Guerrero state in Mexico.

UZBEKISTAN
Mutabar Tadzhibaeva,
chairwoman of the human rights organization Fiery Hearts and a founder of the national movement Civil Society, was charged with 13 economic and political counts and sentenced on March 6th, 2006 to eight years' imprisonment by the Uzbekistan government.