Ceremony for the Martin Ennals Award

Statement by UN Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights Kate Gilmore

10 October 2017

Mesdames, Messieurs, Dear friends,

I am honoured to be a part of this global human rights celebration.

There can be no greater privilege than this - to gather together – freely, safely and in comfort - as we do tonight - in recognition, affirmation, and celebration of those who – day in day out – defend the very DNA of our dignity, our identities, our humanity – who defend indivisible and universal, inalienable and fundamental – human rights.

The power and consequence of human rights defence – and the pressing need for its exercise and for the imprint of its impact – may be measured through a variety of calculus, of course.  But no metric is more baldly revealing of the contribution that human rights defender make than taking measure of the brutal force, pernicious persecution and ruthless repression to which, in so many places, under weight of so many regimes, so many defenders of human rights are subjected today.  If their voices don’t matter? If their activism doesn’t make a difference? If their courage counts for nothing, then why do those who hold just so much power seek so definitively the silence of those with just so little?

By such repression is revealed perversely – with great cruelty - the global and humanising stature of human rights advances that human rights defenders so bravely seek. 

Around the world, pattern and trend, we bear witness to these suppressions of free expression: to policies aimed at destroying dissenting voices, to attacks against public scrutiny, to manipulation of public opinion and electoral polls.  We see the malevolent benefits that unchecked power craves by its interference with the independences of the media, the judiciary, the police, the parliaments; twisting and distorting these State building institutions, tools and methodologies that assert and protect our freedoms into wicked weapons to prevent them.

So that, defenders of women’s rights, the rights of LGBTQI people, of land rights for indigenous peoples, for the rights of minorities can be met with arbitrary arrest, can be held in incommunicado detention, can be subjected to ill-treatment and torture, are disappeared, assassinated.

So that governments’ unchecked powers may inflate under wind of nationalists’ fictional claims about mono-racial origins and sovereign borders; authorities’ reach may expand as populists whip up firestorms of hatred and violence against minority communities; so that the rule of law and principles of public accountability can shrink as journalists, lawyers and judges who strive to work with integrity, and independence, are dismissed, arrested – or worse.

So that the work of NGOs standing up for people’s rights may be obstructed by abusive regulation, by smear campaigns; hamstrung by impossible administrative regulations and threat of exorbitant fines, and by misuse of the judicial system to coerce them.

Yet these elaborate, dense, expansive and expensive means by which suppression of the human rights defender is sought also reveal just how afraid is power of their power – of the power of their scrutiny; just how limited and reluctant is privilege’s capability to justify itself to those who are without privilege; of how power rooted in deceit, bigotry and hate flourishes in places deprived of the sanitising light that shines only through and because of the work of human rights defenders. 

In landscapes of crushing violence and repression, human rights defenders continue to stand up.  By their determined courageous stands we are reminded to our core that - as US Supreme Court Justice Brandies put it - “The most important office is that of the private citizen”.

Allow me to linger here on for a moment on distinguished holders of that most important office - the three private citizens who are nominees for the 2017 Martin Ennals Award tonight.

Karla Avelar, from El Salvador, has faced repeated threats for her human rights work, as well as for who she is – a proud transgender person. Like many lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in Central America, she has been subjected to discrimination, threat and violence. Public officials have failed her. Institutions responsible for upholding justice have not served her. Still, with immense courage, she mobilises support for the rights of LGBTQI persons, for women, for people affected by HIV, migrants and people deprived of their liberty.

The UN Human Rights Office has the privilege of working closely with Ms Avelar, whose work is deeply valuable to the future of her country and her region. We trust the Government of El Salvador will view this event as an opportunity to revise and improve protection for human rights defenders and the LGBTQI community.

Ny Chakrya, Yi Soksan, Lim Mony, Nay Vanda and Ny Sokha from Cambodia, were released on bail in June, after 427 days of a pre-trial detention which the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention determined was arbitrary. They remain charged with bribery of a witness or accomplice in the bribery of a witness – offences which are punishable by 5 to 10 years of imprisonment. The alleged offense relates to their legitimate advice, and reimbursement of food and transport costs, for a woman allegedly linked to the Cambodian opposition leader Kem Sokha, who was himself arrested last month and charged with cconspiracy with a foreign power. The five activists, who have been forbidden to attend this ceremony, have worked for human rights for many years. They have a long history of assisting victims of rights violations – including women subjected to domestic violence, victims of human trafficking, people who have been deprived of land rights and many others.

With national elections looming in Cambodia, and an increasingly intimidating atmosphere for people who oppose the government or adopt independent views, it is essential that the international community continue to advocate greater human rights protection in the country.

Mohamed Zaree, the Egypt Country Director for the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, is subject to a travel ban – like many other human rights defenders in Egypt. He chose to keep working in Cairo even after the staff of the Cairo Institute received death threats, and although many other human rights activists fled the country in June 2013, after 43 NGO workers were sentenced to imprisonment and several international NGOs were shut down. Along with at least 37 other activists and staff members, Mr. Zaree is facing criminal investigation as part of Foreign Funding Case no. 173/2011, which accuses human rights NGOs and human rights defenders of receiving funding from abroad to destabilize the country. Five months ago, during interrogation, he was accused of “intending to harm Egypt” through his role in assisting the Universal Periodic Review, a United Nations human rights mechanism. If prosecuted and convicted, he faces up to 25 years imprisonment.

Egypt's civic space is being obliterated, with ongoing waves of arrests and the intimidation of numerous human rights defenders, journalists and political dissidents, together with the blocking of more than 400 human rights NGO websites and media outlets. It is crucial that the international human rights community continue to monitor what is being done and continue to Egypt’s human rights defenders and its broader civil society.

As I read out these few words in acknowledgement of the 2017 Martin Ennals Award nominees - whose courageous service to their communities and nations inspires and should guide us, let us recall the ancient roots of their courageous demands for justice, for fairness, for rights.  From the moment that we human beings emerged from evolution’s primordial soup – when the very first swamp was drained – we have sought, created and benefited from civil society spaces and the activists that populate them – theirs are the actions of the social connectedness that shapes our daily lives, that weave us into “society”.  We need their voices for our survival, to solve our shared problems, to denounce the unfairness to which we are subjected and we need their dissent to help invent, innovate and to elevate.

Even in the darkest cells of the cruelest prison; in the midst of a resource depleted refugee camp; in a fragile settlement perched high on a remote mountain top; shuffling along the barely shoulder-wide alley ways of sprawling slums; littered among street workers and market stall owners, in the mutterings of farm labours, the chanting of indigenous people or calls of student protestors  - however sputtering or flickering; however overshadowed by coercive State power – and without in absence of the well-intentioned, measurable interventions of global elites still there you will find those who do not lie down; those who will not be silenced, those who stand up.

Their standing up for us all is older than history. And there can be no present that can rightly deprive us of their gift.  We may stand in horror at how world leaders abuse their power.  But let us stand too in awe of how defenders use their relative powerless: Human rights defenders?

Empower them. Support them. Celebrate them. Honour them. Join them.