#EndReprisals

Armel Niyongere, Dieudonné Bashirahishize, Vital Nshimirimana and Lambert Nigarura are four lawyers, human rights defenders and activists from Burundi. They are prominent and well-respected figures within Burundian civil society and their local communities.

They publicly denounced and condemned the use of violence by the Government of Burundi, including following citizens’ protests in 2015, when the former Burundian President, Pierre Nkurunziza, sought a third term in violation of the country’s Constitution.

Fearing for their safety given the violent targeting of protestors by the Government, the lawyers fled Burundi in May and June 2015. To date, they have not been able to return to Burundi out of fear of suffering additional retaliatory actions.

Abdulhadi Al-Khawaja is a Bahraini-Danish advocate known for his unwavering commitment to freedom and democracy. An outspoken human rights defender he serves as a source of inspiration for activists in Bahrain and globally. Abdulhadi has protested Bahrain’s unlawful detention and torture of several civilians since he was a student. He received political asylum in Denmark with his family where he continued his advocacy work, documenting human rights violations in Bahrain. He became the first civil society representative to speak at the first Universal Periodic Review of Bahrain in 2008. He is the co-founder of both the Gulf Centre for Human Rights and the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, as well as the laureate of the 2022 Martin Ennals Award.

A trade unionist, human rights defender, opposition activist and environmental activist, Ahmed Amasha is the co-founder of the League for Families of the Disappeared. The League provides legal support for families of victims of enforced disappearance.

In Egypt, the work of NGOs and human rights defenders is tightly restricted by a law passed in 2019, which comes as a continuation of an already widely criticised law passed in 2017.

Though the 2019 law has swapped planned prison sentences for breaches with hefty fines, it maintains draconian restrictions on NGOs. This law requires that organisations abide by vaguely worded and sweeping concerns of "national security" and "public morality" in order to gain legal recognition in a state registry.

It also limits the activities of registered organisations to serving what authorities call "the State's development plans and the needs of the society", requiring all registered entities to seek yearly approval for their work and strictly limiting their access to foreign funding.

Both iterations of the law on NGOs have severely curtailed the ability of Egyptian NGOs to engage with the UN, which is considered a reprisal for some organisations' previous engagement in the country's Universal Public Review in 2014.

Several human rights defenders are understood to have been targeted by authorities in reprisal for their engagement with UN bodies.

A former mathematics and physics professor, Alfredo Okenve is a human rights defender and anti-corruption activist from Equatorial Guinea. He is the president of the NGO Centro de Estudios e Iniciativas para el Desarrollo de Guinea Ecuatorial (CEIDGE).

His advocacy and activism, including his engagement with UN bodies, and in particular his efforts to highlight issues of transparency related to the work of extractive industry actors present in the country, have been met with stark responses from Equatoguinean authorities. The latter have engaged in repeated acts of reprisals against him in recent years.

[This case has not been included in any Secretary-General reports. ISHR has been campaigning for it to be recognised as a case of reprisals].

Anexa Alfred Cunningham is a brave Miskitu Indigenous leader, woman human rights defender, lawyer and expert on Indigenous peoples rights from Nicaragua.

She defends the ancestral land and natural resources of Indigenous and Afro-descendant Peoples of the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua. She has also worked with Indigenous and Afro-descendants communities in order to investigate the many abuses they suffer and denounce them to the United Nations. These Peoples face attacks by armed groups who seek to take away their ancestral territory with the State’s approval. Their situation has deteriorated since the still unfolding 2018 human rights crisis. In 2022, 90 attacks and at least 32 killings were documented in the Northern Caribbean Coast according to local rights groups. This year, on 11 March, the Wilu community was attacked by an armed group. Houses were burned and five Mayagna indigenous people were killed causing the forced displacement of the rest of the community. Anexa has spoken out against these systemic violence as she considers it amounts to genocide and crimes against humanity.

"Our impact may be large, may be small, and may be nothing. But we must try. It is our duty to the dispossessed and it is the right of civil society." Cao Shunli

Cao Shunli was a courageous Chinese human rights defender and lawyer who was recognised posthumously as a finalist for the prestigious Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders in 2014. Her story is a powerful example of dedication to human rights advocacy under challenging circumstances.

Cao was born in 1961. After studying law she initially worked as a civil servant at China's Ministry of Human Resources. Her trajectory shifted significantly when she was denied government-provided housing. This incident propelled her into activism, particularly against corruption in housing distribution. Her whistleblowing efforts, however, resulted in administrative detentions in 1999 and 2001 and eventually led to the loss of her job and social security benefits in 2001.

Transitioning to a role as a ‘petitioner’ (individuals in China who approach the government to lodge personal grievances and seek remedies) she soon started to help other marginalised citizens. Her activism gained a new dimension in 2008 upon discovering the UN Universal Periodic Review (UPR) process. Under this process, each UN Member State undergoes a peer review of its human rights records every 4.5 years. To prepare for this review the State is expected to produce a national report in consultation with civil society. China was coming under review for the first time in February 2009.

Working with fellow activists, Cao documented abuses, especially in extrajudicial Re-education through Labor (RTL) camps. However, their efforts to present this documentation to China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs were met with the government’s refusal and multiple detentions. She was detained in April 2009 during a rally and subsequently sentenced to RTL, where she experienced denial of food and torture. Despite these hardships, she continued to document RTL abuses.

Cao and other activists made another attempt to engage in the second UPR report being prepared by Chinese authorities for their country's October 2013 review in Geneva. However, the government declined to disclose information on ‘State secrets’ grounds. In response, Cao and a group of activists organised a peaceful sit-in outside of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Their sole request was to meet with officials, and they patiently awaited the Ministry’s response. The sit-in attracted, at times, as many as 200 participants and persisted for nearly five months. It was eventually disbanded four times, with the final clearance occurring in October, just before the UPR Review.

Cao also submitted to the UPR Working Group information about rights abuses of the group of petitioners and reprisals against those seeking participation in the UPR.

Comité de Familiares de Víctimas del Caracazo (COFAVIC), Observatorio Venezolano de Conflictividad Social (OVCS), Centro de Justicia y Paz (CEPAZ), Control Ciudadano and Espacio Público are five non-governmental organisations working for the promotion of human rights in Venezuela.

The organisations have a history of engaging with UN human rights bodies and mechanisms, a crucial effort given the multidimensional crisis that Venezuela is experiencing, with whom they have denounced abuses in the country, including with the Fact-Finding Mission on Venezuela (FFM) established by the Human Rights Council in 2019. The FFM’s mandate includes the investigation of gross human rights violations in the country since 2014 and relies greatly on valuable information communicated by civil society groups such as those mentioned above.

All five NGOs have been stigmatised and discredited publicly and on social media by high-ranking State officials for their collaboration with the United Nations, including and specifically naming the directors of Control Ciudadano, Rocío San Miguel, and Espacio Público, Carlos Correa.