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
Mahboubeh Karami
A journalist who was charged in mid August 2008 with "acting against national security," for her involvement with the peaceful Campaign for Equality, which calls for reforms to improve the inequitable legal status of women in Iran.

CHINA
Mao Hengfeng
A mother of twins who was dismissed from her job in 1988 because she became pregnant with her third child, in violation of China's family planning regulations. Currently, she 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.

MYANMAR
Aung San Suu Kyii
Nobel Peace Prize laureate and arguably Myanmar's most famous prisoner of conscience has spent 13 of the past 19 years under some form of detention. In 1990, her political party won an overwhelming majority of the seats in national parliamentary elections, but military authorities refused to honor those results.

MEXICO
Women of Atenco
During a police operation in response to protests by activists from a local peasant organization in San Salvador Atenco, Mexico, over 45 women were arrested without explanation. Bárbara Italia Méndez is one of at least 26 women who reported being physically and sexually abused by Mexican police.

ZIMBABWE
Women of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA)
For organizing peaceful demonstrations to protest the worsening social, economic and human rights situation in Zimbabwe, WOZA members have been repeatedly harassed, intimidated, beaten and jailed by authorities.