Human rights defenders who engage with the United Nations are increasingly facing reprisals through transnational repression, as States seek to silence criticism beyond their borders.
ISHR calls on States to raise cases of transnational repression as reprisals against human rights defenders who engaged with the United Nations. Here is the message it will send and it calls on anybody to sign up:
Excellency,
In the past, you showed your support in preventing reprisals against those who engage with the United Nations by co-sponsoring the resolution on reprisals and/or publicly naming cases of reprisals against human rights defenders.
The following human rights defenders have dedicated themselves to promoting and safeguarding human rights in their respective countries, including through engagement with the United Nations. Yet, instead of being protected, they are facing reprisals and transnational repression linked to their cooperation with UN human rights mechanisms.
Through threats, criminalisation, surveillance, attacks on family members, professional sanctions, asset seizures and other forms of intimidation, these defenders continue to face consequences for engaging with the United Nations, even while living in exile.
I urge your delegation to raise the following cases during the Human Rights Council and the General Assembly’s Third Committee and publicly condemn all acts of reprisals and transnational repression against individuals who cooperate with the UN.
Basma Mostafa (Egypt) is an investigative journalist and human rights defender who fled Egypt in 2020 after reporting on enforced disappearances, torture and extrajudicial killings. Despite living in exile in Europe, she continues to face threats, harassment, surveillance and intimidation linked to her human rights work and engagement with UN human rights mechanisms. Her case was included in the UN Secretary-General’s reprisals report.
Anna Kwok (Hong Kong) was the Executive Director of the Hong Kong Democracy Council. In connection with her international human rights advocacy and engagement with UN mechanisms, Hong Kong authorities issued an arrest warrant against her, revoked her passport and offered a reward for information leading to her arrest. Her case was included in the Secretary-General’s reprisals report, and reprisals have also extended to her family members.
Armel Niyongere, Dieudonné Bashirahishize, Vital Nshimirimana and Lambert Nigarura (Burundi) are human rights lawyers who were forced into exile after cooperating with the UN Committee against Torture. Despite living in Belgium, they remain subject to the consequences of reprisals, including life sentences handed down in absentia and the freezing of their assets in Burundi. In 2025, the Committee against Torture found that Burundi had violated the Convention against Torture by retaliating against them for engaging with the UN.
These cases underscore the urgent need for States to address transnational repression as a growing threat to the integrity of the UN human rights system and the safety of those who engage with it.
I call on your delegation to publicly raise these cases during the Human Rights Council and the General Assembly’s Third Committee, condemn all acts of reprisals and transnational repression against those who cooperate with the United Nations, and urge the governments concerned to end these violations.
Human rights defenders must be able to engage with the United Nations freely, safely and without fear of retaliation, whether at home or abroad.
Yours sincerely,
your full name will go here
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On 19 June 2026, a large group of UN Special Rapporteurs and experts made an important point about the ongoing ‘peace negations”. While welcomingt he signing of a 14-point Memorandum of Understanding between the United States and Iran they warned that any agreement that fails to address the human rights situation in Iran will be fundamentally incomplete.
In an earlier post I tried to list a large number of links about the situation of human rights defenders in Iran [see: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2026/01/29/iran-enough-attention/?] and my concern about what may happen to HRDs now that the regime will be able to turn their wrath and focus on them is unabated.
“The Memorandum focuses almost entirely on military withdrawal, the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, nuclear commitments, sanctions relief and a $300 billion reconstruction fund . The Iranian people — who have suffered enormously from both external military aggression and internal repression – are barely visible in this framework,” the experts said.
The war has exacted a devastating toll in Iran and in the wider region. Thousands of civilians have been killed in airstrikes striking schools, hospitals, religious and cultural sites and residential areas, with millions internally displaced. The strikes have further worsened an already fragile humanitarian situation, including for the millions of Afghan refugees living in Iran. The conflict has also caused environmental damage to infrastructure, air, water sources, agricultural land as well as increased climate impacts.
“Since the war began in late February, Iranian authorities have moved aggressively against dissent. Thousands have been detained, with many reportedly tortured, forcibly disappeared, subjected to mock executions or forced to confess on camera. At least 156 individuals have been executed since the war began,” they said.
At least 42 individuals were executed on espionage and national security-related charges – many following proceedings in which confessions were reportedly obtained under torture and access to legal counsel denied. Authorities have also seized the assets of at least 1,500 citizens, including hundreds of Iranians living abroad, as a tool of punishment and transnational repression. Bahá’ís, Kurds and Baluch Iranians have been particularly at risk. A recent amnesty announced by the Supreme Leader explicitly excluded those convicted of security-related offences, meaning many protest detainees remain imprisoned.
“The human cost has been compounded by severe economic harm in Iran, as well as in the region and globally,” the experts said.
Three months of near-total internet shutdown – one of the longest ever recorded – severed businesses, livelihoods and families from the outside world. While connectivity has now largely returned, Iranians continue to face heavy filtering, hampering recovery in a country already pushed into deep economic precarity before the war began. Unemployment has increased drastically, monthly food inflation has reached 115%, and widespread delays in wage payments have left daily workers particularly exposed.
The experts hope that the $300 billion reconstruction fund envisaged under the Memorandum, once its implementation mechanism is finalised, will genuinely benefit the Iranian people enduring this economic hardship.
“A deal that serves geopolitical interests while leaving the Iranian people behind is not a peace agreement worthy of the name,” the experts warned. “The reopening the Strait of Hormuz merely restores what existed before this war began. The bar must be far higher than a return to the status quo. The voices of Iranians – millions of whom took to the streets demanding fundamental change – must be heard in any negotiation that claims to secure their future.”
The experts called on all States, including mediating States, to use their influence to ensure that any final deal – negotiated over the next 60 days – incorporates accountability, redress and reparations for victims, as well as concrete, verifiable commitments on a moratorium on executions, the release of arbitrarily detained persons, the disclosure of the fate and whereabouts of forcibly disappeared persons, restoration of open internet access, and the protection of civic space.
The experts cautioned that the end of hostilities must not be mistaken for the restoration of rights. “For the Iranian people, that work is yet to begin.”
Every 10 hours, a human rights defender, journalist or trade unionist is killed or disappeared. Every hour, a child dies in armed conflict. One in five people have experienced discrimination in the past year. These stark figures emerge from new data released by UN Human Rights. The human rights indicators offer a global snapshot of the state of human rights under four key Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) indicators linked to SDG16 and SDG10.
“Behind every data point is a real life lived — or lost,” said UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk. “These new global human rights data show that discrimination, violence and exclusion are systemic and continue to affect those already at the margins.”
Violence against human rights defenders has reached record levels, with at least 5,995 killed since 2015. Discrimination remains widespread and deeply structured, with persons with disabilities facing a high burden at nearly one in three affected, alongside elevated gender-based discrimination against and, for the first time analyzed by our Office, sexual and gender minorities reporting two to three times higher rates than the general population.
Civilian deaths in armed conflict, while declining by 23 per cent in 2025 from an unprecedented peak in 2024, remain catastrophic. Despite these alarming trends, progress in data collection is expanding: discrimination data are now available in 124 countries, up from 15 in 2015, and with a growing range of population groups and grounds of discrimination covered. However, progress in establishing national human rights institutions that comply fully with international standards has stalled, with no overall increase in 2025, signalling that visibility and accountability mechanisms have not kept pace with the scale of the crisis.
Ms. Awa Dabo has extensive experience in human rights, crisis recovery, peacebuilding and prevention, humanitarian affairs and development. She has held several senior level positions within the UN, at country and headquarters levels, most recently as Director and Deputy Head of the UN’s Peace Building and Peace Support Office (DPPA/DPO), where she has been leading and managing efforts to develop peacebuilding strategies and initiatives, and building a strong interface with internal and external partners.
Ms. Dabo previously served as Chief of Country Oversight and Support, for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Regional Bureau for Africa, Senior Adviser and Head of the Crisis and Fragility Policy and Engagement Team for the Crisis Bureau of UNDP, Country Director for UNDP in Tanzania, and Regional Programme Manager and Team Leader at UNDP’s Bureau for Crisis Prevention and Recovery.
Ms. Dabo, who started her UN career as a UN Volunteer (UNV), also worked with other UN and non-UN entities, including the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), and the African Society of International and Comparative Law.
Ms. Dabo holds an LLM in International Human Rights Law from the University of Nottingham, United Kingdom. In addition to her native English, Krio and Mandinka, she is fluent in Pidgin and Wolof.
On 3 June 2026 UN experts expressed dismay at the death in custody of Indigenous Miskitu leader and lawmaker Brooklyn Rivera, and the allegations of enforced disappearance of seven members of his family who had come to claim his remains.
“It is outrageous that repeated warnings and calls for protection have gone unheeded. We consider it an act of cruelty that the Nicaraguan Government is reportedly not allowing Brooklyn Rivera’s family to make decisions about funeral rites and the burial of his remains,” the experts said. [see also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2026/03/14/where-is-nicaraguan-indigenous-leader-brooklyn-rivera/]
They called for a prompt, effective, thorough, independent, impartial and transparent investigation into the circumstances of Rivera’s death in line with international standards, in particular the Minnesota Protocol, and for those responsible to be held accountable.
UN human rights mechanisms have followed this case since 2023 and have repeatedly raised concerns for Brooklyn Rivera’s life, physical integrity, health, and well-being. On 22 August 2025, the human rights experts wrote to the Government of Nicaragua about Rivera’s alleged arbitrary detention and enforced disappearance. They also requested proof of life from Nicaraguan authorities, following rumours of his death in custody. There was no response.
“The reported serious violations committed against Brooklyn Rivera and his family must stop. The Nicaraguan Government must reveal the fate and whereabouts of the seven missing family members and release them immediately,” the experts said.
They urged authorities to immediately respect the rights of Rivera’s family, including granting them access to all relevant information and records, ensuring their participation in decisions regarding his remains, and allowing funeral rites to be carried out in accordance with the family’s wishes and Miskito traditions.
The case of Brooklyn Rivera comes against the backdrop of a grave and sustained deterioration of the human rights situation in Nicaragua. On 1 May 2026, Human Rights Council’s experts warned of a pattern of enforced disappearances, incommunicado detention and detention conditions that could amount to torture or other cruel treatment. In March 2026, the report of a Group of Experts on Nicaragua described repression and persecution by authorities as systematic, amounting to, prima facie, crimes against humanity.
“Rivera’s case cannot be separated from the broader and deeply troubling human rights context in Nicaragua, including the repression of dissent, attacks on civic space, and the persecution of Indigenous leaders, human rights defenders and those perceived as opponents,” the experts said.
The arrest and subsequent enforced disappearance of Rivera occurred after his return from participation in the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in 2023, the experts noted.
On 3 May 2026, UNHCR published “I am addicted to the truth”: A Venezuelan journalist finds safety and purpose in Canada“, written by Zeba Tasci in Ottawa.
For more than 15 years, Venezuelan journalist Halim Naim built his career on one principle: telling the truth. “I am addicted to the truth,” he says. However, that commitment came at a cost. Reporting in a country where freedom of expression was steadily eroding, Halim faced threats, censorship, and detention. As his visibility grew, so did the risks. Despite the danger, he continued his work—leading political coverage, interviewing senior public and political figures, reporting national events, and defending the public’s right to be informed. But the pressure intensified. After speaking about contested elections and giving a platform to opposition voices, threats extended beyond him to his family.
“I separated from my family to protect them,” he recalls. Soon after, Halim fled Venezuela. He sought refuge in Colombia, where he continued advocating for human rights and supporting fellow Venezuelan refugees. But life remained uncertain. Without secure legal status and amid ongoing safety concerns, he struggled to rebuild. “I felt like I was working in hiding.”
In 2025, after years living in exile, he was identified by UNHCR as a journalist at risk and was referred to Canada’s Human Rights Defenders resettlement program. The program is designed to protect individuals who face threats because of their work defending human rights—journalists, activists, and community leaders whose voices are often targeted. For many, it offers a rare and urgent lifeline: a safe pathway out of danger and a chance to continue their human rights work in freedom.
For Halim, the process moved quickly. Within months, he and his family arrived in Canada. “Canada saved me,” he says simply. Beyond safety, the program also provided recognition. “I never felt like a number. I felt like a professional who could contribute.”
By offering a pathway to safety and a supportive resettlement process, the program allows human rights defenders not only to escape persecution, but to rebuild their lives with dignity and purpose. It also enables them to continue contributing their expertise, whether through journalism or advocacy, in their new communities.
Canada’s Human Rights Defenders program offers safety to people defending human rights and face serious risk because of their work. These individuals may be journalists, lawyers, activists, environmental defenders, people working in women’s rights, LGBTQI+ activists, and community leaders. In 2025, UNHCR identified over 100 cases to be recommended for the program.
Halim hopes to use his experience to contribute both to Canada, and one day, Venezuela. His goal remains the same: telling the truth to defend human rights. For Halim, the program that brought him to safety represents something larger than his own story: a commitment to protecting those who speak out against injustice, and ensuring voices are not lost.
“Exile did not silence us. Exile ignited voices, made them stronger, made them more solid, more secure.”
In response to the annual call for inputs from the UN Secretary-General, ISHR, on 28 May 2026, has submitted 66 cases of intimidation and reprisals against human rights defenders engaging with the UN from 24 countries.
ISHR’s submission shows that reprisals against people engaging with the United Nations remain widespread and increasingly sophisticated. Human rights defenders continue to face travel bans, arbitrary detention, surveillance, online harassment, attacks on family members, and misuse of national security laws aimed at silencing cooperation with UN human rights mechanisms.
Key trends highlighted in the report include the growing recognition of transnational repression as a form of retaliation, increasing self-censorship among defenders, and the expanding use of digital surveillance and legal restrictions to intimidate civil society. At the same time, the report notes stronger international attention to reprisals within the Human Rights Council, General Assembly, and Treaty Bodies, alongside continued gaps in accountability and protection for those targeted.
ISHR also submitted information and followed-up on numerous cases, including in Algeria, Bahrain, Belarus, Burundi, Cameroon, China, Djibouti, Egypt, France, Guatemala, India, Israel & United Sates of America, Morocco, Nicaragua, Peru, Russia, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Thailand, Venezuela, Vietnam and Yemen.
Today was the funeral of one my best friends and, more importantly, one of the most significant architects of the international human rights system as it developed in the last 50 years. Theo (Theodoor Cornelis) van Boven, was born in Voorburg on 26 mei 1934 and died peacefully in Maastricht on 9 mei 2026.
I have had the honor to work with him for many years [our lives intertwined over a long period of time and on different locations] and wrote about him several times. Most recently “Courageous Leaders and NGO Initiatives” in Ramcharan and others (ed), The Protection Roles of Human Rights NGOs, Essays in honour of Adrien-Claude Zoller, Brill Nijhoff, Leiden, 2023 (ISBN 978-90-04-51677-9), pp 614-636.
So, here a large part of the section on this great man: This section is about a man who was crucial in getting the United Nations and NGO partners to deal with human rights protection. Much has been written about his work and the enormous contribution Theo van Boven made to the UN human rights machinery as we now know it. .. Nowadays the United Nations has an elaborate machinery to deal with human rights violations. The system is far from perfect and still too often subject to political pressures and selectivity but there are now a great many thematic and country mandates, emergency sessions and there is an International Criminal Court against impunity. Wind back 40 years and none of this existed. The violations were there for all to see but not for the United Nations, which preferred to consider this part of the ‘internal affairs of sovereign states’. The man who would make it his life’s mission to change this, Theo van Boven, got in 1977 the position from where to do it: Director of Human Rights in the UN.
His teenage years were eaten up by the second world war. His memories of that period, his strict protestant background and his law studies in Leiden led him to enter an area that was not so obvious at the time: international human rights. He studied in the USA, wrote there a thesis on freedom of religion and soon afterwards, around 1960, he found himself as a young diplomat shaping the human rights policy of the Netherlands. A decade later the protest against the Vietnam war, the violations by the Greek colonels, the coup d’état in Chile and President Carter’s new policy on human rights pushed human rights suddenly higher on the political agenda. Theo had become an expert member of the UN Sub-commission on Human Rights and was one of the engineers of the first UN effort to investigate large-scale human rights violations, namely Chile. I myself met him when he was still a young professor lecturing on human rights in Amsterdam. Then – in the summer of 1977, the same month I started at the ICJ – he was appointed Director of the small human rights secretariat of the UN in Geneva. Here he started his work to bring dictators to accountability and to give the UN a capacity to deal with gross and systematic violations of human rights. Something that is now taken for granted but it would cost Theo his job.
Unlike his predecessors, Theo van Boven did not put all his faith in quiet diplomacy and he regularly talked about the need for the UN to address gross and systematic violations, about the mobilisation of shame and stated that the UN should care about victims. He also started to receive the victims – and the NGOs who represent them – in his office. This led to an incident that would be comic if it was not for the consequences. J. Matarollo was an Argentinean exile lobbying against the generals in his homeland who were killing left-wing opponents by the thousands. Theo agreed to hear him and told his secretary (inherited from his predecessor) to call Matarollo to give him an appointment in the early of hours of the next day. She faithfully called the Argentinean embassy assuming that he was a diplomat as these were the kind of people that normally met with the Director. The next day there was no Matarollo but an angry Note Verbale from Argentinean Ambassador Martinez accusing Theo of meeting with terrorists.
In the UN he did not conform to the image of the traditional diplomat, e.g. by pinning an anti-apartheid button on his suit, but even more so by publicly stating that NGO reports about dead bodies floating down a river in Guatemala were true, or by denouncing disappearances in Chile and Argentina. When in 1980 the government in the USA changed and Ronald Reagan and his team decided to play down violations by right-wing regimes, especially in Latin America, Theo did not flinch and openly criticised their support to these dictatorships. “Naming and shaming” by a UN official was unusual and not easily accepted by the diplomatic community. The Latin American regimes – led by Argentina and silently encouraged by the US – started a campaign to oust Van Boven as Director of Human Rights.
To complicate matters for van Boven, the new UN Secretary-General must have felt little sympathy for this particular Director, as J. Perez de Cuellar had earlier, in 1980, been appointed as Special Representative by the previous Secretary General to go to Uruguay and look into the human rights situation. His report was such a whitewash that it was heavily criticized in the Commission on Human Rights. How correct this reaction had been was shown when the famous pianist Estrella – whom de Cuellar claimed to have visited in the Libertad prison – came to Geneva and told the I.C.J and others that there had been no such visit.
In the meantime in 1980 Theo had put great energy – together with some key NGOs in creating a Working Group on Enforced Disappearances. As a mechanism focusing only on Argentina was politically not feasible, the new idea was to create a thematic mandate on the phenomenon of disappearances in the knowledge that Argentina was going to be the main target. At the decisive session the tension was enormous as the outcome of the vote was very uncertain. The Jordanian Chairman of that session had to deal with endless procedural issues, many of them proposed by Uruguay (egged on by Argentina which was only an observer). Finally, late at night the Chair felt that the resolution creating the mandate could be passed without a vote and moved to do so, but the Uruguayan Ambassador again started to put up his name plate as a sign that he wanted the floor. The Chairman quite unusually interrupting, looked directly at the Uruguayan Ambassador and said: “I URGE my brother from Uruguay NOT to do this..” The name plate slowly turned downwards again and the Chair immediately declared the resolution adopted. The NGOs and tens of Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo in the public galleries started a spontaneous applause and quite a tear was shed. ..
In early 1982 the issue of Theo van Boven’s tenure as Director came to the fore. His contract had to be renewed which normally was a routine matter, but not this time. The issue came to an explosion when Theo’s opening speech to the Human Rights Commission was sent on a Friday evening to the UN Secretariat in NY for information and at the same time given to the UN Office of Information in Geneva for distribution at the time of delivery the next Monday morning. The UN Office of Information decided to make the statement available to the media that very Friday evening (with the usual proviso: “check against delivery”). The Representative of Guatemala in Geneva obtained a copy of the statement and vehemently objected to the statement. The SG’s office demanded that Theo should refrain from mentioning countries by name – which Theo refused not only out of principle but also because the press would notice the difference on Monday and assume that there had been pressure to remove the names.
As a family friend bringing the kids back from a ski outing, I happened to overhear Theo on the phone to New York agreeing to a ‘compromise’: he would mention at the beginning of his speech that certain passages were done in his ‘personal capacity’. A few days later Theo was suddenly informed that his contract would anyway not be prolonged. His announcement at a dramatic session of the Human Rights Commission grew quickly into an international diplomatic incident.
As I was on the verge of leaving the ICJ, I had some time on my hands. So I got the idea – warmly supported by Niall McDermot – to publish a book with a selection of Theo’s major speeches from the last five years. One of his Special assistants, Bertie Ramcharan, who had written a good part of them, was very helpful and we managed to get a book out within only 6 weeks. The first copy was flown in to Geneva by the publisher and presented to Theo at a public farewell which the ICJ had organised for him. NGOs, some UN staff and students showed up in such large numbers at the university hall that the fire brigade had to refuse access to late comers. Speech after speech – including by Saddrudin Aga Khan – cantered on Theo role in getting the UN machinery on human rights to deal with violations more concretely and on his support for human rights NGOs…
With Ian Guest and many others, I remain convinced that Theo’s dismissal from the UN was the result of pressure by Latin American dictatorships with support from the Reagan administration. As stated in People Matter, he was “hired and fired for the same reason: his deep commitment to human rights”.
After his dismissal Theo and his family returned to the Netherlands where many were very disappointed that there was no real interest in giving him an equivalent position in the foreign affairs department and he ‘ended up’ in the new University of Maastricht as professor of international law, where together with others such as Cees Flinterman he bent the research programme into his favourite direction: human rights. He continued his involvement in international activism in a variety of functions: with NGOs (e.g. European Human Rights Foundation, IMADR, International Alert), and with the UN (e,g. the Sub-commission on Human Rights, Special Rapporteur on Compensation 1990 -1993, Special Rapporteur on Torture 2001-2005, first Registrar of the UN Yugoslavia Tribunal). In 1998 he became the Head of the Dutch Delegation to the Rome Conference which created the International Criminal Court (ICC).
In 1985 he was called to Buenos Aires as a witness to testify against the nine military leaders (including Videla) for their human rights violations in the period 1976 en 1983. The UN had advised him not to go but he felt that he should do anything to end the impunity of these perpetrators. Theo’s testimony – he was called already on the 2nd day – was seen as crucial in establishing that the leaders of the Junta must have known about the massive violations. Theo took the same position with regard to the father of princess Maxima Zorreguieta (the wife of the king of the Netherlands). As Minister of Agriculture Jorge Zorreguieta must have known about the atrocities and should at least have taken distance instead of denying any knowledge. A position which Theo took in 2001 and was still heard defending in 2012.
In the light of Theo van Boven’s recurring clashes with Argentina it must have given him great moral satisfaction when on 26 November 2009 he received a degree honoris causa from the University of Buenos Aires as well as the highest decoration from the Government.
ICTJ stated: “Van Boven’s commitment to the pursuit of justice was relentless. He spoke up about impunity and accountability in contexts of repression such as the military dictatorships in Argentina and Chile, where he also championed the cause of the disappeared, even when political pressure limited others from doing so. Today, ICTJ honors his voice, his perspective, and his deep-rooted legacy. Inspired by his resolve, we will continue our commitment to uphold human dignity above all else in the pursuit of justice and lasting peace all over the world, however long it takes.“
This week, United Nations Human Rights bids farewell to Deputy High Commissioner Nada Al-Nashif. Al-Nashif began her UN career at United Nations Development Programme, where she worked from 1991 to 2006.[She was Assistant Director-General/Regional Director of the International Labour Organization’s Regional Office for Arab States from 2007 to 2014.
Nada Al-Nashif performed her job with great gusto and I was personally deeply impressed by her commitment to make the OCHCR work better with less means. She will be missed in Geneva.
UN High Commissioner for Human Right Volker Turk posted:
Dear Nada, my heartfelt thanks for your dedication, leadership, and generosity over the past six years. You helped ensure that we could continue to offer support and protection to people in need at a very challenging time. You will be greatly missed, and I wish you success and happiness in the next chapter.
On 18 May 2026 UN experts and Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International expressed serious concern about the yearlong pre-trial detention of lawyer and woman human rights defender Ruth Eleonora López Alfaro in El Salvador.
“As time passes without the trial beginning, the presumption that detention is necessary is weakened,” the experts said.
López has been held in pre-trial detention for a year, officially authorised since 4 June 2025. During this time, she has been denied regular visits, despite precautionary measures ordered on 22 September 2025 by the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights. “This increases Ms. López’s vulnerability and puts her physical and psychological integrity at risk,” the experts said.
In maintaining judicial secrecy, the public is prevented access to hearings and the defence’s access to the criminal file is limited, thereby threatening the principle of equality of arms and the right to an adequate defence. The right to legal assistance of a lawyer of one’s choice is a cornerstone of the right to defence as established in Article 14 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
“The circumstances of detention and the irregularities in the proceedings, point towards López being subject to reprisals because of her legitimate activities as a human rights defender and lawyer,” they said.
The experts underscored that there are elements suggesting that the criminalisation and prolonged pre-trial detention of Ruth López not only stem from her work exposing corruption and human rights violations, but also appear to reinforce patterns of social control designed to silence women leaders in the public sphere, while also seriously undermining the work of their organisations.
The experts urged the State to release Ruth López Alfaro immediately and consider alternative measures instead of keeping her in custody. They also called for the removal of the judicial secrecy imposed in the criminal proceedings, the cessation of all acts of harassment against her, and guarantees that she may carry out her human rights work without fear of reprisals. The experts are in contact with the Government of El Salvador on this matter.
Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards 