On 9 February 2021, Front Line Defenders published its Global Analysis 2020 which details the physical assaults, defamation campaigns, digital security threats, judicial harassment, and gendered attacks faced by HRDs, especially women and gender non-conforming human rights defenders.
In 2020, human rights defenders responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by taking on additional, and often leading, roles around community health and support to fill gaps left by governments. HRDs proved invaluable to saving lives, delivering food parcels or PPE or medicines to the sick and elderly who were unable to move during lockdown periods. And yet, despite measures taken to respond to the pandemic, HRDs continued to face an onslaught of attacks, ranging from criminalisation and harassment to physical attack and killings, as political and economic elites lashed out against those working for social, economic, racial and gender justice. This is a deliberate and well-resourced attack on human rights and human rights defenders by corrupt and autocratic governments and political leaders who fear democracy and the realization of human rights will end their plunder and put them in jail.
The report gives a breakdown of the most common violations by region both by gender and in total as reported to Front Line Defenders in 2020. The gender breakdown percentages shown reflect the violations experienced as a proportion of the total number of violations to which each group was exposed. At least 331 environmental defenders were killed globally. The majority of those deaths were among people who worked in the defense of land and environment rights, and the rights of Indigenous peoples. Of the 331 murders registered last year, Colombia had the most murders at 177, by far the highest. [see also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2021/02/15/hrw-blasts-colombia-over-human-rights-defenders-murders/]
This is the video of Front Line Defenders “Global Analysis 2020” Press Conference (11 Feb 2021)
For last year’s report see: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2020/01/14/front-line-defenders-global-analysis-2019-is-out-304-hrds-killed/
https://www.frontlinedefenders.org/en/resource-publication/global-analysis-2020
This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.
