#EndReprisals

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.

The Human Right Center ‘Viasna’ is a non-governmental organisation actively working for the development of civil society and the promotion of human rights in Belarus, also providing legal aid to people in defending their rights and public interests.

Viasna has a long-standing history of cooperation with the United Nations human rights bodies and mechanisms, which has increased amid the ongoing crackdown on human rights defenders and organisations in Belarus.

Due to its engagement with the UN, Viasna has been subjected to continuous acts of harassment and intimidation at the hands of the government, including the raiding of their offices and the arbitrary detention of its members.

Jiang Tianyong is a prominent human rights lawyer and legal rights activist from China. He has been working at the grassroots level to defend land and housing rights, promote the rights of vulnerable social groups and expose the root causes of systemic rights abuses.

He defended high-profile cases in China, including clients with HIV, Falun Gong practitioners, Tibetan protesters and victims of the 2008 milk scandal.

Despite being arbitrarily disbarred by the government in 2009, Jiang has tirelessly continued his valuable human rights work to improve the situation in China. He has persisted in denouncing human rights violations in his country and supported numerous well-known human rights defenders unlawfully detained.

Ibrahim Metwally Hegazy is a human rights defender and lawyer working on the issue of enforced disappearances. He is a co-founder and the coordinator of the Association of the Families of the Disappeared in Egypt.

The network focuses on assisting families in locating and investigating the fate of forcibly or involuntarily disappeared loved ones. Metwally Hegazy founded the organisaton following the disappearance of his own son in July 2013, whose whereabouts remain unknown.

In September 2017, while on his way to Geneva at the invitation of the United Nations Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances, he was disappeared for two days, and was subsequently arbitrarily detained. Five years later, he is still in detention.

Vanessa Mendoza Cortés is a psychologist and the president of Associació Stop Violències Andorra, which focuses on gender-based violence, sexual and reproductive rights, and advocates for safe and legal abortion in Andorra. Andorra enforces a total ban on abortions.

Associació Stop Violències Andorra supports pregnant women and girls to access abortions abroad and speaks out to demand access to safe and legal abortion in Andorra. Vanessa Mendoza Cortés is the main spokesperson for the organisation.

Until 2020, civil society in Hong Kong was vibrant. The Civil Human Rights Front (CHRF), for example, was established in 2002 with the aim of giving a platform to different organisations to promote the development of human rights in Hong Kong. The CHRF was responsible for organising the largest peaceful protests in Hong Kong’s history, notably protests against the National Security Law in 2003 with half a million Hong Kongers taking to the streets, as well as the one and two million person-strong anti-extradition law protests on 9 and 16 June 2019 respectively.

Human rights organisations in Hong Kong had engaged consistently and constructively with the UN, and regularly contributed to the work of the UN Treaty Bodies and Special Procedures. Forty-five civil society groups organised themselves into a strong coalition for policy advocacy and engagement with the Hong Kong government linked to the 2018 Universal Periodic Review, while UN expert recommendations and comments on Hong Kong were widely shared, and often addressed in substantive meetings of the Legislative Council, Hong Kong’s elected legislature. Many saw the UN as a venue of justice, as well as a source of authoritative guidance on issues ranging from police violence to abuses against migrant domestic workers.

This engagement came to a screeching halt after the imposition by Beijing of the National Security Law for Hong Kong (NSL), which entered into force on 1 July 2020.

Amina Al-Abdouli is 42 years old. She is a mother of five, three girls and two boys who were all under 18 at the time of her arrest. She used to work as a school teacher She was advocating for the Arab Spring and sympathised especially with the Syrian uprising.

Maryam Al Balushi, 27 years old, was a student at the College of Technology.

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.

Kadar Abdi Ibrahim is a human rights defender and journalist from Djibouti. For 20 years, Kadar was a high school math teacher and then a Professor and Researcher at the University of Djibouti. He was dismissed due to his human rights work.

From 2015, Kadar was the co-director and chief editor of L’Aurore, Djibouti’s only privately-owned media outlet. In 2016, the newspaper was banned following the publication of a story on one of the victims of the Buldhuqo massacre, crackdown by Djibouti security forces on a religious celebration and a meeting of the opposition on 21 December 2015 that left at least 27 people dead. Kadar is also the president of the political party Movement for Democracy and Freedom (MoDEL) since December 2021. Over the years, Kadar has been arrested several times by the police in an attempt to silence him.

Mohamed El-Baqer is director of the Adalah Center for Rights and Freedoms. The Adalah Center for Rights and Freedoms is a non-governmental organisation established in 2014 to uphold and promote the rights of students, refugees, and migrants.

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.

Naâma Asfari is a Sahrawi human rights defender who has campaigned for the self-determination of Western Sahara. The territory is a former Spanish colony that remains under Moroccan occupation despite a 1992 UN ruling for a referendum on independence, which has yet to be complied with.

In a heavily criticised trial held in 2013, Asfari was sentenced to 30 years in prison for his alleged involvement in the murder of 11 Moroccan soldiers during a 2010 operation that saw the brutal dismantling of a large camp set up in Gdim Izik by Sahrawi civil society organisations to protest against Morocco's occupation of the region.

Organic Farming for Gorillas (OFFGO), is an organisation founded in September 2015 that aims to support the practices and rights of traditional farming and nomadic livestock communities in the North West Region of Cameroon.

In May 2019, Special Procedures mandate holders expressed concern about a defamation campaign and acts of reprisals against OFFGO, who had published information about abuses and disputes linked to land and business operations in Cameroon.

The defamation campaign began in 2015, following OFFGO's publication of a report describing how communities were facing 'systematic intimidation and harassment by local administrative and judicial authorities' and denouncing a 'serious case of alleged land grabbing by a tea and cattle corporation.'