In July 2020, Front Line Defenders launched Cypher (@cypher_comics on Instagram), a digital comics magazine that advances the organization’s storytelling and narrative framing work in collaboration with and in support of HRDs. Working with artists from around the world, including the award-winning visual storyteller, Beldan Sezen, as creative director, the ’zine is a monthly publication featuring stories of HRDs, their work and the challenges they face. [see: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2020/07/23/new-cypher-comics-for-human-rights-defenders/]
If you are interested in an annual subscription to receive printed editions of Cypher, please email campaigns@frontlinedefenders.org, with ‘Subscription’ in the subject line, and you will be sent more information about options.
Cypher 02 (published on 18 July 2020) features an audio interview with Palestinian HRD and artist Hafez Omar – listen to the interview by clicking on the ‘Hafez Talks’ buttons when viewing the comcis in the ‘zine viewer below (the PDF file does not support the audio files).
On 19 June, 2020 AfricanDefenders launched a podcast series on African human rights defenders in exile
“If you have to leave, leave. But refuse to keep quiet. Silencing you is what all oppressive regimes want. Don’t stop defending others because you are outside your country. Defending others is defending ourselves.” Interview with an African HRD in exile
Human rights defenders (HRDs) in Africa face grave risks in conducting their invaluable work of promoting the rights of others, protecting the environment, and holding the powerful to account. All too often, they are forced to leave their homes to seek protection, after threats, surveillance, judicial harassment, arbitrary arrests, enforced disappearance, torture, and targeting of colleagues and family members.
Exile impacts every aspect of a person’s life, and no experience of exile is the same. Exiled HRDs face serious challenges in their human rights work, such as losing legitimacy in the eyes of their government and their communities, collecting information remotely in a safe manner, and accessing funding. Many exiled HRDs also continue to face security concerns, worry about the safety of colleagues and family members in their country of origin, and struggle with socio-economic integration in their host country. Exile can also take a toll on their wellbeing and family dynamics.
Yet, the majority of exiled HRDs continue their human rights work, disseminating the information received by monitors on the ground through regional and international advocacy and campaigning, mobilising diaspora communities, and at times (re-)establishing organisations in exile. If authoritarian governments, corrupt leaders, and violent militia groups aimed to silence HRDs by forcing them into exile, their strategy has largely failed.
Based on research that collected the testimonies of more than 120 HRDs, in-depth case studies, and live interviews with four exiled HRDs,Exile Shall Not Silence Us is a podcast series that highlights the professional, security, socio-economic, and psychosocial challenges of HRDs in exile in Africa, but most of all their achievements and resilience strategies.
In episode 1, Cristina Orsini, Senior Programme Officer at AfricanDefenders, gives an overview of the main findings of the research on the situation of African HRDs in exile. Listen to Episode 1
0n 4 June 2020 Sun Narin for the VOA reported that The Monk Council in Siem Reap province, Cambodia, expelled prominent activist monk and human rights defender Venerable Luon Savath based on leaked audio recordings purportedly between the monk and a group of women.
Venerable Loun Sovath, an award-winning human rights activist, attends the commemoration of the sixth anniversary of the violent crackdown on garment workers in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, January 3, 2020. (Hul Reaksmey/VOA Khmer)
This in not the first time that Loun Sovath is in trouble with the ‘authorities’ be they secular or religious, so there could be reasonable doubt about the veracity of the recordings. See:
The leaked audio recordings are purportedly between the monk and a group of women. In a decision dated June 3, head of the Monk Council in Siem Reap, Chum Kimleng, alleged that Luon Sovath had conversations about “deep love” with women, which were shared on Facebook. The statement added that the conversations were between the monk, a woman and her daughters, alleging that Luon Sovath indulged in sexual activity.
“If Luon Sovath wears monk robes from now on, related authorities take legal actions,” read the announcement, which defrocked the monk effective Wednesday.
The Monk Council claimed to have investigated the video recordings, but did not provide any evidence or forensic analysis with the statement to show the voice in the recordings belonged to Luon Sovath or if he had acted in violation of religious norms. VOA Khmer attempted to reach Luon Sovath on the phone and his social media accounts on Thursday, but the activist monk did not respond to requests for comment.
There are four videos circulating on Facebook, and seem to originate from one account, called Srey Da Chi-Kraeng that was created on May 30. The videos, according to the accompanying text on Facebook, are recordings with four women – a mother and three daughters.
The video recordings are of an unidentified person, or persons, sitting in a dimly-lit room and having Facebook audio conversation, ranging seven to 10 minutes each. The video is shot so that only the person’s hand holding the smartphone can be seen.
The Facebook account involved in the alleged call has a male voice and uses the image of Luon Sovath and his name in Khmer script. The conversations are flirtatious in nature and include discussions about giving each other massages.
VOA Khmer could identify two Facebook accounts and one page used by Luon Sovath in the past. One of the accounts, which seems to belong to the venerable monk was created in 2017, it has the same display picture as that seen in the videotaped Facebook calls.
However, VOA Khmer found another Facebook account, called Luon Sovath, using the same display picture and was created on May 29, a day before the Srey Da Chi-Kraeng account was created.
The Monk Council in Siem Reap could not be reached on Thursday to provide details of their investigation into the recordings.
Bor Bet, a monk and member of Independent Monk Network for Social Justice, received a call from Luon Sovath last week, with the activist monk alleging that “people wanted to mistreat me.”
“He told me that they want to frame him,” Bor Bet said. “[Luon Sovath said] it is a political case and done because we are human right defenders.”
A spokesperson for the Ministry of Culture and Religion, Seng Somony, said the ministry had received the decision to defrock Luon Sovath, rejecting the accusation that the development was politically motivated…
Luon Sovath has been internationally recognized for his work in documenting land rights abuses in Cambodia and was featured in the documentary, A Cambodian Spring. [https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/may/20/cambodian-spring-review] In 2012, he received the Martin Ennals Award.
Deo Wasswa stated on 11 May 2020 on Capital Radio in Uganda that “Attacks on human rights defenders have become rampant in Africa”. He bases himself on a report dubbed “African youth defenders perspectives 2019 from rhetoric to action” launched by Transformative leaders Network-Africa, which says these attacks are carried out by a range of state and non-state actors, including armed militant and extremist groups, police and military forces, government authorities and off campus groups among others.According to Fredrick Ekakoro Etoori, head of secretariat at Transformative Leaders Network -Africa (TRANET-Africa), the report, provides a general situation of youth human rights defenders in 2019, the category of the youth human rights defenders at most risk, the country and or region that recorded the most cases of youth human rights defenders at risk among others.
The report documented 70 cases in Uganda, 25 cases in South Sudan, Kenya 25, Sudan 16, Tanzania 2, south Africa 5 Among others.
In 2018 the Norwegian Human Rights Fund and Memria continued their partnership on the unique I Defend Rights initiative, an audio archive of hundreds of stories told by human rights defenders. The purpose of this listening project is to commemorate and celebrate the important roles that human rights defenders have by recording, archiving and sharing their experiences and contributions. The platform includes personal accounts of 188 human rights defenders. This are some of the highlights in 2018:
March We had the first open call for stories on our site (English version). Within the first three months, over 50 human rights defenders spoke about why they defend rights. These stories were published on the platform and shared on social media.
May Official launching of Yo Defiendo Derechos and Je Defénds le Droits, the archives for Spanish and French-speaking communities.
August We held a sensemaking workshop in New York with key stakeholders and partners including communication experts to analyze a sample of the archive and think about next steps for the project.
September Our team participated in a community fair at Forum Asia’s 8th Asian Regional Human Rights Defenders Forum in Bali and engaged with human rights defenders from the region
October We attended the Human Rights Defenders World Summit in Paris and installed our first storytelling booth. With the help of volunteers, we collected 65 stories in three days.
A HRD recording his message at the HRD World Summit in Paris, October 2018
November We collected more stories and created an exhibition at the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo during the Norwegian Human Rights Fund 30th Anniversary Conference. (Listen to the NHRF Conference and the panel on new tools with the participation of I Defend Rights).
LOOKING FORWARD TO 2019
The gathering will continue during 2019 with an emphasis on dissemination. Our main channels will be social media, a new website, and an exhibition. We want to do this in collaboration with our partners. We hope to have our new website by February, one that reflects our new image and lets us showcase the amazing stories from so many wonderful human rights defenders on our platform.
We are also joining forces with designers to create an exhibition with the voices of the rights defenders. We will be working with libraries, universities, museums and unexpected venues to reach a diverse audience.
New Tacticsis organizing podcast conversations on the potential of podcasting in human rights activism and the power of narrative storytelling. Hosted by Gianna Brassil. Podcasts are downloadable episodes of audio content, typically part of a series on a thematic topic. Over the past few years, podcasts have grown into a dynamic media form, with niche shows catering to listeners’ political, cultural, educational, musical, and technological audio palate. While podcasts are often produced by professional radio stations, they can also be created independent media creators. The freelance nature of podcasts makes them a unique tool for activists who want to broaden the audience of their message through a low-cost means.
New Tactics created its own podcast that explores issues of representation, the value of oral storytelling, and accessibility in creating independent media. The tension between a podcast’s entertainment value and the representation of human suffering is a topic that we grapple with in our podcast. We ask questions about how we can create stories that are honest and empathetic, meanwhile knowing that sometimes it is impossible to “create comprehensible stories out of the incomprehensible” (That the World May Know, James Dawes). Our podcast guests also discuss the uniqueness of voices and oral storytelling as tools to re-humanize conflicts and highlight the experiences of individual human lives. Finally, we discuss the accessibility of podcasts. With a microphone, simple audio editing software like Adobe Audition or Garageband, and an online platform such as Soundcloud to distribute episodes, activists can reach countless potential listeners. The power of becoming a media creator cannot be underestimated, and this episode seeks to demonstrate how media creators have the ability to reshape the landscape of representation, define for themselves what it means to be a human rights activist, and nuance an audience’s conception of how human rights stories can be told.
I Defend Rights: Shifting the Narrative about Human Rights Defenders and Civil Society Globally is a project of the Norwegian Human Rights Fund and Memria.org, in collaboration with numerous partners around the world (see the list of partners below).
It is about collecting audio accountsfrom human rights defenders to create a global archive of recordings of their experiences working on the front lines defending the rights of others. We will then develop multiple ways to share many of these audio recordings with much broader audiences, such as through exhibits and using social media platforms. Any defender (including you!) can participate and easily:
It only takes a few minutes.
You can re-record as many times as you want.
We will ask you a few simple questions.
You can remain anonymous.
We will not ask you to reveal sensitive information.
The “I Defend Rights” project will make audible the voices of hundreds of Human Rights Defenders from every part of the world. By collecting these recordings, the project team will build a massive public audio archive. They are then committed to working with defenders and other partners to disseminate and share these narratives through creative communications strategies. This project will contribute to our shared goal of shifting the global narrative about the thousands of ordinary women and men who promote human rights.
This project helps show how diverse and multiple the human rights community is and how courageous and valuable human rights defenders are in securing rights for all of us, sometimes at great risk. Human rights activists are not enemies of the societies they live in, they are not anti-development or threats to national security as many governments try to depict them. On the contrary, they actively contribute to peace, democracy, and sustainable development. They are agents of positive change. The project will also help us understand why we need to collectively recognize and protect them.
If you peacefully defend human rights, I urge you to take a few moments to sign up at the top of this website. You will then receive an email and be able to respond to a few questions and add your audio recording to this archive and project. It only takes a few minutes.
Human rights and new media being one on my main interest, readers will not be surprised that I am happy to promote the launch of ‘FirstCast‘, by HRF (Human Rights First). It is an audio podcast on iTunes which plans to bring compelling human rights stories from around the world as. This week’s FirstCast features Shehrbano Taseer, the daughter of Punjab Governor Salmaan Taseer who was assassinated by his bodyguard for publicly condemning the misuse of blasphemy laws in Pakistan. Shehrbano is continuing her father’s work and has become an international voice for the victims of extremism and religious intolerance.
Subscribing is easy: from FirstCast page, launch iTunes on your desktop by clicking “View in iTunes.” Once the iTunes app opens, you’ll see our page with all of our podcasts. Under the Human Rights First logo, click “Subscribe Free.” And voila! You’re all set. You can also listen to past shows about the ongoing crackdown in Bahrain, LGBTI rights in Uganda, and the return of the torture debate post-Bin Laden.
If there are any question please address them to Sharon Kelly McBride, HRF’s Communications Director
Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards 