Meet the people fighting to defend human rights of others internationally
Over the weekend more than 100 human rights defenders left Ireland for countries and regimes around the world where they face threats ranging from harassment and imprisonment to torture and death for their work in asserting the rights of others.
They were visiting Ireland for the Dublin Platform hosted by Front Line Defenders which every two years provides an opportunity for activists to network, campaign and receive moral and practical support.
Operating on the “protect one, empower a thousand” principle, Front Line provides practical help such as technology to support communications, security tips and a rescue service for defenders who have to flee their country.
The organisation also keeps their profiles high in the hope that hostile governments will be less likely to target them under an international spotlight.
Here are just a few who plea that the light never goes out.
Sandra Namutebi, Uganda: ‘People are dying, we cannot be silent’
As Sandra Namutebi was in Ireland, back home in Uganda a candidate in the upcoming presidential election was explaining his vision for gay people like her.
“All homosexuals will be rehabilitated because they have demons and we have specialists to chase out demons,” said Abed Bwanika, explaining his plans for a “moral re-correction centre” to tackle such “social ills”.
And that’s a moderate view. Sitting president Yoweri Museveni, stood over the Anti-Homosexuality Bill which proposed the death penalty for repeat offences.
Although later watered down, and last year deemed invalid on a technicality, the bill’s legacy remains, feeding intolerance of LGBTI people.
As chair of the National LGBTI Security Committee in Uganda, Namutebi heads up a hotline and rapid reaction response service which helps people who have been attacked, abused, evicted, fired or arrested because of their sexuality.
Her group can source safe houses and lawyers, medical care, and accompaniment for victims filing police reports but it’s a struggle that keeps developing new complexities.
“We have a new trend of cases that are building up , like expelling students who are below 18,” says Namutebi, 33.
“If we help them, then it is said we are recruiting children, teaching them to have sex, making them gay.
“If we go to the school, they say this child will spoil the school for everyone else. If we go to the parents, they are ashamed and say don’t come home. If we try to pay for the child to go to school, we are recruiting. So you end up being stuck.”
The support Sandra’s group has from western NGOs is also used against the LGBTI community and many members have had a romantic encounter turn into a nightmare when they are robbed of their valuables and threatened with a rape claim if they go to the police.
“We have many cases of blackmail and extortion. The government say we have lot of money from foreign countries so in a society where people are really struggling economically, we are an easy target.” Sandra says many LGBTI people have fled Uganda, and that possibly only a quarter of the pioneers of the rights movement remain.
She is documenting all violations she responds to as part of a research project but says many incidents, including deaths, go unrecorded.
“People die silently,” she says. “They get beaten and are denied medical treatment. Or they turn to drug addiction and drinking. They lose their jobs and become sex workers and contract HIV. They commit suicide. We can not be silent about this.”
Charlene Carruthers, USA: ‘Idea of being free limited to certain people’
With a black president in the White House, the last seven years should have been a celebration for young black activists in the US but for Charlene Carruthers, the series of high-profile deaths of unarmed black people at the hands of police and vigilantes has put celebrating on hold.
“The idea of what it means to be free in America is limited to certain people,” says Carruthers, 30, national director of campaign group, Black Youth Project 100.
“What it means to be free means not to worry about driving down the street and if I forget to signal, I’ll be pulled over and I’ll be the next Sandra Bland,” she says, referring to the black woman who died mysteriously in police custody in July after being stopped for failing to signal a lane change.
“What it means to be black, as macabre as may sounds, is to be not fully human, to not be enough. So America is absolutely an anti-black society.”
They are strong words but can be backed by statistics that show black people are more likely to be poor, unemployed, lacking in educational achievement, homeless, arrested, imprisoned and shot dead by law enforcers, both official and self-styled.
From a working-class family from Chicago’s South Side, Carruthers found herself one of just 16 black students in a class of 400 in her first year in university, looking up at a lectern almost exclusively occupied by white professors.
So access for black children to quality public schools is a priority for her group, knowing that a good education can liberate the most economically disadvantaged.
But liberation in a practical sense is also a key issue. A black man in the US has a one-in-three chance of going to jail in their lifetime while the probability for a white man is one in 25. She says incarceration in the US has become an industry, generating vast profits for private prison operators and corporations who use cheap prison labour.
“The government spends billions of dollars a year on incarceration. Imagine if that money was spent on things that actually keep us safe — education, housing, a fair wage. That’s real liberation.”
Although hard to prove, Carruthers says her group is under routine police surveillance and, outside the police, is subject to intense online harassment.
“We think about safety a lot but I work to live a life that’s not based on paranoia because that’s just another kind of prison.”
Juan Carlos Flores Solis, Mexico: ‘They tried to break my spirit’
The battle Juan Carlos Flores Solis is fighting sounds like a typical big industry versus small landholders struggle. If only it was as simple as that.
His stance against the massive gas pipeline, thermal electricity plant and associated developments along a 160km zone in central Mexico has brought him into conflict with his government, the military, a state utility, energy corporations from two continents, a Dutch pension fund, the Inter-American Development Bank and the list goes on.
He spent 10 months in prison as a result of his activism, on charges a judge declared were unfounded, but when he recently submitted a constitutional petition questioning the use of the army to protect the project, a further arrest warrant was issued.
“In prison I was in a cell six metres square with 20 people,” he says of his detention.
“I did not experience physical aggression but there was a lot of harassment and there were many delays in my trial.
“It was an attempt to break my spirit because hope was created that I would be let go but it was crushed again and again. The message is, you are in our hands, you don’t belong to yourself, you belong to us.”
Flores Solis is spokesman for the People’s Front in Defence of the Water and Earth, which works to protect the rights of indigenous people and small farmers in the connecting regions of Morelos, Puebla, and Tlaxcala where rich volcanic soils make for fertile agricultural land.
The government wants to turn the area into a power-exporting industrial hub but opponents say the project, plus a new highway and other associated infrastructure, will wipe out many farms while the demand for water will leave remaining land parched.
They argue farmers were pressured into signing over their land and they decry the heavy-handed tactics of the police and military.
They also fear catastrophe should the frequent rumblings at the Popocatepetl volcano become strong enough to rupture the pipes.
They say the fact that the military are also responsible for civilian safety during volcanic episodes has been used to intimidate the locals into submission.
The Mexican revolution of 1910 began in this region when small farmers rose up against the big hacienda owners starving them of land and water.
“At that time the land and water were still there so it was a question of who had rights to them. Now they are destroying the land and water so this time if we don’t succeed in stopping them, there is no way back.”
Sukhgerel Dugersuren, Mongolia: ‘People have been beaten, killed’
There is a tale in Mongolia that the upturned toes of traditional boots were so designed to avoid disturbing the earth when walking, so for many, open-cast mining is an assault on their beliefs.
But even many non-religious citizens see the vast mines spreading across Mongolia as an assault - on human rights and common sense.
Sukhgerel Dugersuren is head of OT Watch which monitors the Oyu Tolgoi copper mine operated by the Rio Tinto corporation in the Gobi desert which has taken the grazing lands and water of nomadic herders.
“Loss of water means loss of pastures. You can have a huge piece of land but if it doesn’t have water, it is not pasture,” she explains.
“The herders feed us. Mongolians are big meat-eaters and the livestock sector produces raw materials for the rest of the economy — textile, cashmere, wool, meat, diary. The loss of that is not being evaluated.” Dugersuren’s group works to highlight the issues but the response from the government has been hostile.
“Anyone trying to criticise or raise issues is considered working against the national interest and any person who is working against the national interest falls under the law on national security.” Dugersuren has felt the impact in terms of stolen laptops and mysterious loss of internet connection whenever she has important communications lined up.
Some in her field have been deported and for their supporters in the local communities, consequences have been more grave.
“People have been beaten, killed, harassed, threatened, fired. It’s hard to prove but this year two people were killed in what was said to be ordinary fights but they had no argument with anyone — the only link you can draw is that the person was against a specific mine.” If mining can’t be reversed, Dugersuren says at the very least people should be compensated in a sustainable way.
“One of our partners was a herder and race horse breeder. His job now is to collect trash from company roads.
“The company says we have compensated you — we gave you a job. He says what about my future? When you close what am I going to do? What about satisfaction? I can not be proud of being your trash collector. The company says that because today you have mobile phones or washing machines or you bought a car, you’re better off, you’re modernising. The herders say, I got a car that depreciates and soon it’s going to be a problem for me while when I had the herds they would appreciate and my wealth would grow.”
Anwar Al Bunni, Syria: ‘Prisoner of Assad regime dies many times’
Anwar Al Bunni has the curse of bilocation that plagues many exiles.
“I live in Germany but I don’t live there. In my mind and in my heart I am in Syria,” he says.
All his life lawyer Al Bunni, 56, waited for the revolution. He even drafted a new constitution for his country in preparation for the moment it would break free from the repressive dictatorship he grew up with. But after 20 years in the courts defending other outspoken critics of the regime, he too became a political prisoner when he was convicted of damaging the national morale and reputation and sentenced to five years in jail.
He almost died twice there — from an attack and later a hunger strike — but thoughts of his wife and three children pulled him through. He was awarded the Front Line Defenders Award in 2008 and his wife Ragheda Issa Refki came to Dublin to collect it on his behalf, at the time unsure if she would ever hold her husband again. When he was released in mid-2011, he had missed the start of the Syrian uprising but he was just in time to see Assad’s brutal crackdown escalate into what could kindly be called massacres but what many have termed genocide.
Al Bunni and his colleagues at the Syrian Centre for Legal Studies and Research tried their best to continue their work but its manager, Khalil Maatouck, was arrested in October 2012 and there has been no news of him since.
Reluctantly, Al Bunni and his family fled, escaping over the mountains to Beiruit while the German authorities arranged safe passage to Berlin where he continues to co-ordinate and publicise the activities of activists still in Syria.
He is adamant that the Syrian people’s only hope lies in an international military force removing Assad and despairs that the West wants to prop him up. “How can they shake his hand when his hands are full of blood?
“Everything I experienced is small when you compare with what is happening now in Syria. People are dying of hunger, of cold, of no medical care, with no homes and their children bombed and dead in the streets.
“People say I prefer I would be prisoner of Daesh [Islamic State] than to be prisoner of Assad regime. The prisoner of Daesh — one cut and dead. The prisoner of Assad regime — he dies many, many times before he dies.”
Shahindha Ismail, Maldives: ‘We are beyond feeling intimidated’
The tranquil white sands and turquoise waters of the Maldives hide a turbulent reality of violence, corruption and human rights abuses that the abundant tourists never see.
A state of emergency was declared last Thursday while Shahindha Ismail of the Maldivian Democracy Network was in Ireland but Ismail shrugged it off.
“Since I left there’s been a blackout, a fire at the airport, an explosives find in the city. The state of emergency was expected,” she said.
Of more immediate concern to her was that on the same day, her husband, Hussain Shameem, a lawyer representing the vice-president who is detained on suspicion of involvement in a bomb plot against the president, was arbitrarily suspended from the courts while on a trip outside the country.
“Whether they want to lure him back, or want to take away his permit to practice, I don’t know but he is more at risk than me now,” she said.
The Maldives had its first democratic elections in 2008 but the years since have been an ugly soap opera of bloody rivalries with gangs carrying out killings and beatings on behalf of feuding politicians and businessmen, police acting with brutality and unqualified judges ruling according to who lines their pockets.
Journalist Ahmed Rilwan, an outspoken critic of the mayhem, was disappeared last year and Shahinda’s organisation was declared by the police to have acted unlawfully in hiring a private investigator from the UK to compile a file on his case.
Several gang members named in the file made clear on social media their displeasure at the actions of Shahinda and her colleagues.
“We have gone beyond feeling intimidated. We have been constantly harassed and threatened on social media, we have been followed around, our offices have been vandalised, data stolen. Some of us have received SMS threats, we have been taken in for questioning, we have been confronted on the road and told you will be disappeared or killed. Sadly we have become accustomed to it.” Some activists have in the past advocated a tourism boycott of the Maldives, stressing most of the profits go to corrupt businesses, but the government brought in a law making it illegal to call for a boycott.
“What I call for is for people who are interested in visiting the Maldives to choose carefully where they are going to stay. There are pro-democracy resorts. So maybe do a little research about where your money will end up.”
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