24 January 2025 was the Day of the Endangered Lawyer. Its purpose is to call attention to threatened human rights lawyers who work to advance the rule of law and promote human rights under governmental harassment and intimidation, often at great personal risk. Each year the focus is on those lawyers working in one designated country.
In 2025, the Day of the Endangered Lawyer spotlights the persecution of lawyers in Belarus. Since 2020, a crackdown by the Belarus government has resulted in the targeting of lawyers and human rights defenders. Legal practitioners face increasing criminal sanctions, arbitrary detention and systemic interference in their abilities to practice law. Constitutional and legislative changes have eroded the independence of the judiciary and professional legal bodies and given the executive branch unwarranted control over the judiciary and legal profession.
Today, the ABA recognizes these human rights lawyers who champion justice and fight for the rule of law.
To mark the Day of the Endangered Lawyer, the Law Society of England and Wales issued a press release on 24 January honouring legal professionals who are targeted for upholding the rule of law and defending a strong justice system.
The Law Society has published its annual intervention tracker which shows that the Society took 40 actions relating to 17 countries in 2023. Most of these actions were initiated by concerns relating to arbitrary arrest or detention (58%) followed by harassment, threats and violence (27%).
Law Society president Nick Emmerson said: “Across the world, lawyers continue to face harassment, surveillance, detention, torture, enforced disappearance and arbitrary arrest and conviction...
We use this day to draw attention to the plight faced by countless lawyers across the globe, as they fight for their right to freely exercise their profession and uphold the rule of law.
A recent example comes from Amnesty International on 25 January 2024: On 31 October 2023, human rights lawyer, Hoda Abdelmoniem, was due to be released after serving her unjust five-year prison sentence stemming solely from the exercise of her human rights. Instead, the Supreme State Security Prosecution (SSSP) ordered her pretrial detention pending investigations into similar bogus terrorism-related charges in a separate case No. 730 of 2020. During a rare visit to 10th of Ramadan prison on 4 January, her family learned that her health continues to deteriorate and that she developed an ear infection, affecting her balance and sight. She must be immediately and unconditionally released. [see also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2020/11/29/2020-award-of-european-bars-associations-ccbe-goes-to-seven-egyptian-lawyers-who-are-in-prison/]
Teresa Donnelly, who leads the LSO’s Human Rights Monitoring Group, spoke at the Osgoode Hall event in Toronto commemorating International Day of the Endangered Lawyer 2020.
When supporting colleagues abroad, lawyers should consider offering behind-the-scenes support as well as making public statements, a Pakistan-based journalist told an audience at the Law Society of Ontario last week. “What has to be really kept in mind is how that support is voiced and contextualized,” said Beena Sarwar. “If it takes a simplistic view or plays into anti-Pakistan rhetoric …. it’s so easy to make Pakistan a scapegoat and target.” Sarwar, whose blog has gained international acclaim for its coverage of freedom, human rights, peace and even influential jurists, was one speaker at the Law Society of Ontario’s International Day of the Endangered Lawyer 2020, hosted at Osgoode Hall in Toronto on 24 January by the Lawyers’ Rights Watch Canada,Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.
This year, lawyers organized a protest at the Pakistani embassy at the Hague. Past events focused on Egypt, Turkey, China and Honduras, among others.
The LSO’s Human Rights Monitoring Group has issued several statements about treatment of lawyers in Pakistan over the past few years. In the aftermath of the Kasi attack, the LSO urged the Pakistani government to “put an end to all acts of violence against lawyers and human rights defenders in Pakistan,” and “ensure that all lawyers can carry out their legitimate activities without fear of physical violence or other human rights violations.”
Other incidents that have been condemned by the LSO are the 2015 murder of Samiullah Afridi (a lawyer who defended a doctor that allegedly assisted CIA agents with their hunt for al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden); and a suicide bomb attack on the Pakistani judiciary.
“Over the past decades, lawyers in Pakistan have been subjected to acts of mass terrorism, murder, attempted murder, assaults, (death) threats, contempt proceedings, harassment and intimidation, as well as judicial harassment and torture in detention, merely for engaging in their professional duties as lawyers,” a letter from Lawyers’ Rights Watch Canada said earlier this month. “Their families also have been targeted, and some have even been murdered. Some lawyers have also been threatened with disbarment and/or had their homes and offices raided by the police.”
At the event, bencher Teresa Donnelly read a letter the law society had received from a Pakistani lawyer. Lawyers cannot become “heroes,” Donnelly recounted from the email. Instead, she said, the writer felt the role of lawyers was to “focus on their work improving the justice system.” While support is needed for the Pakistani bar, Sarwar explained that Western organizations must be careful not to jump to issue statements that play into conspiracy theories about Western involvement. Abdul (Hamid) Bashani Khan, a lawyer at the Abdul Hamid Khan Law Office in Mississauga, also spoke on the panel, where speakers highlighted some of the common misunderstandings of the situation in Pakistan, particularly amid anti-Muslim rhetoric publicized in the post-911 era. For example, panelists said the bench and bar are portrayed as both very strong — given the influence of the lawyers’ movement of Pakistan — and also very weak, in the fight for judicial independence and public support. In 2014, a lawyer was killed after representing a high-profile professor charged with blasphemy.
To mark the Day of the Endangered Lawyer, the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute released a toolkit to help the legal community navigate the complex task of protecting lawyers at risk. The three-part kit includes supports for risk management, human rights mechanisms, emergency protocols, legal frameworks, international protection, security plans and response chains.
Pakistan is the focus of this year’s Day of the Endangered Lawyer (January 24) and the American Bar Association is organising a teleconference, in which panelists will provide a report of the current state of attacks on the judiciary, bar and other human rights defenders in Pakistan, as well as offering suggestions for how the ABA and other outside organizations can lend support. [see also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2018/01/22/24-january-2018-day-of-the-endangered-lawyer-focus-on-egypt/]
Moderator:
Sara Sandford, Immediate Past Co-Chair, International Human Rights Committee
Speakers:
Jalila Haider, Founder of We the Humans
Farahnaz Ispahani, Senior Fellow, Religious Freedom Institute; Global Fellow, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
Hussain Haqqani, Former Ambassador to US
Raza Rumi, Director of the Park Center for Independent Media, Ithaca College; Visiting Faculty at Cornell Institute for Public Affairs; and Editor of Daily Times
I did not know about this special Day for Endangered Lawyerswhich is meant to call for the attention of lawyers all over the world for colleagues who are being harassed, silenced, pressured, threatened, persecuted, tortured, killed and disappeared. Although relatively unknown, it has the support of several lawyers’ organizations such as:
The Foundation has devoted its attention to the situation in Iran, Turkey, Basque Country, Columbia and the Philippines in the past. In 2016 the focus was on the situation in Honduras. Detailed information and reports are available at www.aeud.org.
The UK Law Society president Joe Egan said: ‘We honour the courage and commitment of lawyers around the world who uphold justice, often despite considerable risk to themselves, their colleagues and their families.’ The country focus for the Day of the Endangered Lawyer 2018 is Egypt, where lawyers and human rights defenders face prosecution and travel bans for carrying out professional duties.
Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards 