'What future will we build on the stones of Gaza?': Human Rights Defenders join calls for ceasefire

It is time to choose what we believe in and I choose to believe in the promise of the UN Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and especially in the UN Declaration on Human Rights Defenders because HRDs are the people who breathe life into the UDHR, writes Mary Lawlor

Wed, 06 Dec, 2023 - 18:59

Mary Lawlor

It is December: the days are dark and the gloom of the international situation matches the gradual fading of the light. December 9 is the 25th anniversary of the UN Declaration on Human Rights Defenders and December 10 is the 75th anniversary of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.

Out of the ashes of war came the belief in a better way of living and being human. Now, here we are again—war and rumours of war. Last year, there were more armed conflicts than at any time since 1945.

I have worked for human rights for more than 40 years and I thought I had seen it all: the disappearances and killings of the brutal military regimes in Chile and Argentina, the cruelty of the civil war in the former Yugoslavia and the relentless bloodlust of the genocide in Rwanda.

Despite everything, it was always possible to be buoyed up by those courageous human rights defenders (HRDs) who stubbornly persist in believing that these barbarities are an aberration and that if we hold the line for truth and justice things will improve.

I remember the HRD from Iran who described the inhumanity of Evin prison where every day prisoners had to queue up to wash, to get food—and to be tortured. He described how, as he waited in that dark corridor, a door opened and a woman walked out of the torture room. As she walked past him, shrouded in her abaya he could see the expression of pain in her eyes and the trail of blood as her abaya dragged on the ground behind her. Knowing what awaited him, he chose prison rather than abandon the cause of human rights.

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In September this year, thousands of people queued for hours in Santiago in Chile to view Salvador Allende’s shoes at an exhibition reminding people of the price paid in defence of democracy and human rights after the US-backed military coup on September 11, 1973.

The next day Roberto Garreton made a choice. He gave up his job as a corporate lawyer and became a human rights lawyer defending those being tried before the military courts. He was intimidated and arrested, but he never gave up. In an interview just before he died in 2021 he said: “Every human rights violation has three components: a brutal act, cowardice and a lie. There is no human rights violation without these three conditions.”

Roberto Garreton also said:

A just and democratic society cannot be built on a foundation of lies or guilty silence.

Those words remain true today, nowhere more so than in Gaza where civilians are being crushed between the brutality and duplicity of Hamas and the callousness and indiscriminate violence of the Israeli army.

Raji Sourani founded the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights and has been a relentless critic of human rights violations in Gaza documenting them with independence and impartiality. As independent UN experts express their concern at the grave and growing risk of genocide against the Palestinian people by Israel in Gaza, HRDs are standing firm.

Raji, who narrowly escaped death when his house was bombed, said: “Israel has the right to be angry with Hamas but why wage war on the people of Gaza? Despite all the bombing Hamas continues to function like a Swiss watch. Because they can’t locate Hamas they are destroying the people of Gaza. We are not leaving. We are the stones of the valley. We will be here forever.”

Palestinians amid the destruction from the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip in Rafah on Monday. Despite all the bombing Hamas continues to function like a Swiss watch. Photo: AP/Hatem Ali

It seems we have learned nothing from the past. Twenty years after the war in the Former Yugoslavia, which tore communities apart, Jacob Finci, President of the Jewish Community of Bosnia Herzegovina has spoken of how, once again, children are being taught to see their neighbours as enemies.

I draw hope from the new generation of HRDs out there who cut through the double standards and see the humanity of the people whose rights are being violated whoever and wherever they are. Right now young HRDs around the world are joining Palestinians and Israeli groups in calls for a ceasefire and an end to the occupation.

Ireland is not immune to division and hate. Social media, here as elsewhere, has proved an incubator for the vicious racism that culminated in the looting and violence in Dublin recently. While people are right to question the source of the violence, it is a concern that when faced with a social problem, the government instinctively turns to the default solution of increased powers for the police and greater surveillance without addressing the underlying issues of poverty and marginalisation.

Meanwhile conflicts rage in Sudan, Yemen, Myanmar and Ukraine. Rohingya refugees are abandoned to their fate. Safe routes for people escaping conflict are closed by states. Action on climate change remains tokenistic and every year 400+ human rights defenders are murdered for defending the rights of others.

Algeria

I have just returned from a 10-day country visit to Algeria to evaluate the situation of human rights defenders three years after an extraordinary demonstration of citizen power led to a peaceful change in government and ushered in some reforms and human rights protections. But human rights defenders remain at risk. I met with women and men who peacefully exposed corruption, led trade unions, advocated for cultural rights, protected the environment and sought justice for the families of those disappeared in the 1990s during the so-called Black Decade.

They face surveillance, are banned from travelling abroad and are hit with multiple judicial proceedings. They are often branded as “terrorists” and imprisoned for “undermining national unity". Yet they remain steadfast in their choices. Several HRDs who attempted to meet me were prevented from doing so.

It speaks volumes that so fearful were they of reprisals, that they asked me not to name them or make a fuss, in case they suffered further punishment. A woman I met in prison, Kamira Nait Sid, is serving a three-year prison term on terrorism-related charges for her presence at a conference where the exiled leader of an ethnic group joined online. She said to me, "Although my body is in prison, my soul is free".

I have three children and two grandchildren and I wonder about the world for them in years to come. I ask myself: “What future will we build on the stones of Gaza, Mariupol or Aleppo?”

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In a poem I commissioned for the 25th anniversary of the Declaration, poet Nikita Gill captured this perfectly when she wrote: “They are carriers of justice and an infinite dream, where a better, kinder world is every child’s right not an impossibility”.