Nathalia Bonilla is an environmental human rights defender from Ecuador who works in the protection of the rights of Nature. She told ISHR about her country’s sharp policy turn in favour of extractive activities and spoke about the ‘utopia’ she and her peers would like to see in its place. ‘A revolution where you can’t dance is not my revolution,’ Nathalia said, in arguing for an ‘environmentalism for the people’.
On 15 December 2025 Emma Woollacott, in Forbes, referred to a new study that shows that 7 in 10 women human rights defenders, activists and journalists have experienced online violence in the course of their work. Produced through the UN Women’s ACT to End Violence against Women program and supported by the European Commission, “Tipping point: The chilling escalation of violence against women in the public sphere” draws on a global survey of women from 119 countries.
Along with online threats and harassment, more than 4 in 10 have experienced offline harm linked to online abuse — more than twice as many as in 2020, the researchers found. This can range from verbal harassment right up to physical assault, stalking and swatting.
“These figures confirm that digital violence is not virtual — it’s real violence with real-world consequences,” said Sarah Hendricks, director of policy, programme and intergovernmental division at UN Women.
“Women who speak up for our human rights, report the news or lead social movements are being targeted with abuse designed to shame, silence and push them out of public debate. Increasingly, those attacks do not stop at the screen — they end at women’s front doors. We cannot allow online spaces to become platforms for intimidation that silence women and undermine democracy.”
And AI is only making things worse, with almost 1 in 4 women human rights defenders, activists and journalists having experienced AI-assisted online violence, such as deepfake imagery and manipulated content. This is most often the case for writers and public communicators who focus on human rights issues, such as social media content creators and influencers, for whom the figure reaches 30%.
“Gender-based online violence is not a new phenomenon, but its scale certainly is,” said report co-author Lea Hellmueller, associate professor in journalism at City St George’s and associate dean for research in the School of Communication and Creativity.
“AI tools enable the production of cheaper and faster abusive content, which is detrimental to women in public life — and beyond,” Hellmueller added.
Tech firms are partly responsible, the researchers said, with the report calling for better tools to identify, monitor, report and fend off AI-assisted online violence. The researchers also want to see more legal and regulatory mechanisms to force tech firms to prevent their technologies being deployed against women in the public sphere.
“Our next steps include publishing data from the survey about the opportunities for, and barriers to, law enforcement and legal redress for survivors of online violence,” said Julie Posetti, chair of the Centre for Journalism and Democracy at City St George’s, University of London, one of the authors of the report. “We will also focus on creative efforts to counter gender-based online violence and policy recommendations to help hold the Big Tech facilitators of this dangerous phenomenon accountable.”
Cressida Kuala lives in a small gold mining town in the Highlands Region of Porgera District in the Enga Province of Papua New Guinea. In 2011, Cressida founded the Porgera Red Wara (River) Women’s Association, and she started speaking out about issues such as environmental degradation, chemical waste, pollution, expropriation of land, and the impact on the local community.
On 14 November 2025, Al Jazeera (Mariamne Everett) and other media reported that international NGOs, such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, have decried a sharp decline in civil liberties and a pervading “injustice” in Tunisia since President Kais Saied came to power in 2019, as authorities escalate their crackdown on the opposition, activists and foreign nongovernmental organisations.
“Tunisian authorities have increasingly escalated their crackdown on human rights defenders and independent non-governmental organizations (NGOs) through arbitrary arrests, detention, asset freezes, bank restrictions and court-ordered suspensions, all under the pretext of fighting ‘suspicious’ foreign funding and shielding ‘national interests’,” Amnesty International said in a statement on Friday.
Tunisia’s crackdown on civil society has reached an unprecedented level, according to Amnesty, as six NGO workers and human rights defenders from the Tunisian Council for Refugees are “being criminally prosecuted on charges solely related to their legitimate work supporting refugees and asylum seekers”. The trial’s opening session, initially scheduled for October 16, has been adjourned to November 24.
Within the past four months, Tunisia has temporarily suspended the activities of at least 14 Tunisian and international NGOs, said Amnesty, including the Tunisian Association of Democratic Women and the World Organisation against Torture.
Human Rights Watch said in a statement on Friday that Tunis’s Court of Appeal will hear on November 17 the appeal of more than 30 people “unjustly sentenced to heavy prison terms in a politically motivated ‘Conspiracy Case’” mass trial in April.
“Four of those detained are on hunger strike, including one who, according to his lawyers, was subjected to physical violence in prison on November 11.”
The defendants were charged with plotting to destabilise the country under various articles of Tunisia’s Penal Code and the 2015 Counterterrorism Law. Human Rights Watch, which reviewed the judicial documents, said the charges are unfounded and lack credible evidence. The NGO has called on the court to immediately overturn the convictions and ensure the release of all those detained.
The 37 people detained include opponents of Saied, lawyers, activists and researchers. Their prison terms range from four to 66 years for “conspiracy against state security” and terrorism offences. Jawhar Ben Mbarek – cofounder of Tunisia’s main opposition alliance, the National Salvation Front – began a hunger strike on October 29 to protest his arbitrary detention. Ben Mbarek was sentenced to 18 years behind bars on charges of “conspiracy against state security” and “belonging to a terrorist group”.
For this 31st edition, ten of the world’s leading human rights NGOs composing the Jury of the Martin Ennals Award – Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, FIDH, HURIDOCS, Bread for the World, Human Rights First, World Organisation Against Torture, International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), International Service for Human Rights (ISHR), and Front Line Defenders – have selected, after much deliberation, three human rights defenders for their exceptional contribution to the human rights movement. [se also https://www.trueheroesfilms.org/thedigest/awards/043F9D13-640A-412C-90E8-99952CA56DCE]
The 2025 Laureate is Ana Paula Gomes de Oliveira (Brazil), who co-founded the collective ‘Mothers of Manguinhos’ to fight for justice after the killing of her son, a 19-year-old Black man, who was shot in the back by a military police officer in the favelas of Rio on his way back from his girlfriend’s house in May 2014. The collective serves as a front for resistance and advocacy, but also as a network of emotional support and solidarity between women who share stories of similar loss. These women, in their majority Black, many of whom have lost children and other family members to violent actions by law enforcement officials, came together to denounce violence in the favelas, especially police violence that disproportionately affects poor Black youth. ‘When we are born Black and raised in the favelas, we are targeted by a racist system that is also reinforced by public security policies based on death and imprisonment,’ says Ana Paula. According to the UN, killings by the police have more than doubled in the last ten years in Brazil, with more than 6000 killings every year over the past six years. Black people, overwhelmingly men, represent a shocking rate of 82,7% of the killings by police officers in 2023. ‘The racist violence in Brazilian streets merits the full attention of the federal government and the international community,’ says Hans Thoolen, Chair of the Martin Ennals Award Jury. The collective ‘Mothers of Manguinhos’ fights for truth, memory, justice, freedom and the human rights of Black, poor, and peripheral lives. The collective is a member of the UN Antiracism Coalition (UNARC) and during the 57th session of the Human Rights Council, Ana Paula delivered a powerful message at a side event organised by UNARC on the perspectives of the Afro-Brazilian community directly affected by police violence in Brazil.
The Jury also recognised two finalists: Aloikin Praise Opoloje (Uganda) and Saadia Mosbah (Tunisia).
Aloikin Praise Opoloje is a 26-year-old Ugandan student who has become a leading voice against corruption, social injustice, and human rights abuses in Uganda. Inspired by the dire living and educational conditions in her home district of Palisa, she has mobilised thousands through social media and organised major peaceful protests, including the March to Parliament and the Nude Protest against government mismanagement, which prompted official accountability for the Kiteezi landfill tragedy. Despite repeated arrests in 2024 and ongoing legal charges, Aloikin went on to create the WeThePeople movement, which informs young Ugandans about their civic rights and non-violent resistance.
Saadia Mosbah is a leading Tunisian human rights activist and co-founder of Mnemty (‘My Dream’), the main organisation dedicated to fighting racism and racial discrimination in Tunisia. She has spearheaded initiatives through education, awareness raising and legislative advocacy, which have led to the 2016 national debate on systemic racism, the adoption of the Anti-Racism Law No. 50 (2018), and the declaration of 23 January as the National Day for the Abolition of Slavery for Tunisia (since 2019). Her work has also focused on combatting prejudice against migrant people and promoting migrant and refugee rights. Despite her legitimate activism, Saadia Mosbah and Mnemty have faced intense smear campaigns. She was arrested on 6 May 2024 on false accusations of financial crimes and remains in pre-trial detention without a set trial date.
The UN High Commissioner for human rights will award the selected laureate during the ceremony to take place on 26 November 2025 in Geneva, Switzerland. [https://www.martinennalsaward.org/2025-edition/]
Patricia Egessa, Director of Global Communications, published this NGO assessment:
Looking back at the year 2000 from a gender justice perspective is sobering. The previous decade had famously been declared as ‘the end of history’ by Western male political pundits. But women knew better. As conflicts continued to rage with devastating and disproportionate impacts on women and families, gender justice activists decided history still had some way to go and demanded a central role in peacebuilding. Their efforts galvanized the adoption of the pathbreaking UN Resolution 1325, which established the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda.
As the WPS agenda marks its 25th anniversary, civil society organizations are uniting to reaffirm the importance of women’s full and meaningful participation and leadership in global processes. The NGO Working Group on Women, Peace and Security has released its annual Open Letter calling on the international community to defend the core values of the WPS agenda amid growing threats to women’s rights globally. We cite just a part of that letter as a statement of our shared concern:
Yet, when we should be paying tribute to the hard-fought achievements of these feminist movements, we are instead confronting an alarming backlash against women’s autonomy and rights, and against those who advocate for them, at a time when the consequences of armed conflict and crises on the lives of women and girls could not be more devastating. The very term gender—a core concept in international human rights law mobilized by feminist movements for decades to challenge the systematic oppression of women and LGBTQIA+ people—is today being blatantly undermined by anti-gender movements globally, including at the United Nations (UN). Civil society and human rights defenders around the world, especially those defending gender equality, women’s rights, sexual and reproductive rights, and LGBTQIA+ rights, are being targeted for who they are and the work they do. Combined with rising militarism, erosion of respect for international law, capitalist exploitation and slashing of funding for gender equality and women’s rights organizations, these attacks have thrown our work and our movements into crisis, even as the vision of the WPS agenda is more necessary than ever.
ICRW has proudly signed on to this collective statement precisely for the reason so clearly articulated in this letter: to remain silent as the WPS agenda and those who advocate for it are attacked not only undermines decades of progress but jeopardizes peace and security for everyone. Twenty-five years after the adoption of the UN resolution, our work is unfinished. We join over 600 organizations worldwide in ensuring that our unified voice reaches the UN Security Council, governments, and the world’s citizens who understand and support a more peaceful world for our children.
Marie Louise Baricako, a women’s rights activist from Burundi, in Geneva for the Human Rights Council (Geneva Solutions/Michelle Langrand)
Michelle Langrand in Geneva Solutions of 8 October 2025, talks with Burundian women’s rights defender Marie Louise Baricako – who was In Geneva to attend the Human Rights Council. She warns that her country is sinking deeper into crisis as the region teeters on the brink, urging the international community to push for a national dialogue.
Marie Louise Baricako recalls the Arusha negotiations with a mixture of pride and sorrow. In the late 1990s, she pushed for women to have a seat at the table in the talks aimed at ending Burundi’s inter-ethic civil war – and yet, 25 years on, much of the agreement’s promises remain unfulfilled.
“If women are left out, Burundi will keep losing,” she says. “How can you hope to develop when 52 per cent of your population are left aside?”
Baricako has spent a lifetime trying to empower that 52 per cent. In 1988, she became the first Burundian woman to earn a PhD, studying in Cameroon, and later led the English department at the University of Burundi. Born in Muramvya province, she spent much of her adult life abroad, including in The Gambia, where she joined Femme Africa Solidarité, a feminist network founded in Geneva in 1996 to promote female leadership in peace, security and development……
Fortuné Gaetan Zongo, UN special rapporteur on Burundi since 2021, warns of a “real risk” of regional destabilisation. “If Kinshasa were to fall, Burundi would be deeply affected,” he tells Geneva Solutions. Some 78,000 Congolese refugees fleeing the violence have crossed into Burundi since the beginning of the year, raising questions about how Burundi, already struggling, can cope with their humanitarian needs while the UN aid system is strapped for cash.
Baricako sees how ethnic narratives continue to be exploited by those in power. “This is what our leaders today are nourishing, because in their mind, Tutsi had kept power for so long alone, excluding Hutus. Now, they say ‘we have taken it, we shall not release it, until Jesus comes back’,” she says.
Yet repression is not limited to a group. “When women or human rights defenders dare to speak out on any violation, the next day, either they are in prison or they are killed,” she says…
Despite the bleak prospects, Baricako places hope in ordinary Burundians. “They have had time to believe in these stories of Hutus or Tutsi being the enemy. Now I believe people have realised that it is not about the ethnic group,” she says. “Burundians want a peaceful country, and they are ready to work as hard as they can to rebuild Burundi.”
Baricako stresses that talks would lead to more unfulfilled promises without the participation of those in power. She calls on the African Union and the East African Community to step out of their indifference and pressure Burundi to the table.
Zongo, who has been met with the government’s outright refusal to cooperate with him and other human rights experts, also notes that certain states with good relations with Burundi, like Tanzania, DRC and Cameroon, “can convince Burundi to sit at the table and engage in cooperation.”
For all the setbacks, Baricako remains steadfast. “The support of civil society has been essential in staying strong and not abandoning the fight,” she says. “Peace is our business, whether they want it or not. I will not go to the battlefield with a weapon, but what I have in my heart, I will use it to stand for peace and security of Burundians.”
‘Water is to protected. Water is not for sale. Water is to be defended.’
Doris Ramírez is a fisherwoman and a fisherfolk’s union representative from Guatemala’s southern coast. She told ISHR how her late husband’s passing drove her to embrace activism and described her aspirations for the future for her coastal community.
In March 2025, Doris attended the 58th session of the UN Human Rights Council, delivering a statement calling on Guatemala to abide by its obligations to secure the protection of marine biodiversity, the traditional rights of fisherfolk and the protection of those who are protecting the environment.
The death of a female Iranian political prisoner in hospital following a series of seizures has sparked outrage from Iran’s two Nobel laureates and right groups who have labeled her death a state-sponsored murder. Somayeh Rashididied after several days in hospital following her transfer from Qarchak Prison near Tehran, Iran’s judiciary-affiliated Mizan news agency reported on Thursday.
Rashidi, born in 1983, was detained in April for allegedly writing anti-government graffiti slogans in Tehran’s Javadieh district.
Nobel Peace laureates Narges Mohammadi condemned her death in custody, describing it as part of a pattern of abuse in detention. “This devastating loss of Somayeh Rashidi is not an accident but the result of a systematic policy of neglect and cruelty inside Iranian prisons,” Mohammadi said in a post on X.
Rights groups and activists including Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi had previously raised alarm about Rashidi’s deteriorating condition, highlighting her urgent need for medical attention.
Iran International reported earlier this month that Rashidi’s condition had severely declined, with doctors holding little hope for her recovery.
Human rights groups including the Norway-based Iran Human Rights (IHR) have publicly called for the closure of Qarchak, describing it as “one of the darkest symbols of systematic human rights violations in the Islamic Republic.” Rashidi death comes less than a week after another prisoner, Maryam Shahraki, died in Qarchak last Friday. According to Norway-based rights group Hengaw Organizattion, three women have already died in this facility this year due to lack of adequate medical care — Jamileh Azizi on September 19, Shahraki on September 13, and Farzaneh Bijanipour on Januar
In an update on its website on 6 August 2025, Front Line Defenders in raising alarm over the worsening conditions of detention for prominent Belarusian human rights defender Nasta Loika, currently held in Homel Correctional Facility No. 4. On August 1, independent Belarusian media reported that Loika had been transferred to a secure housing unit under harsher detention conditions — a common punitive tactic used by the Belarusian authorities against political prisoners. [see also; https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2023/11/07/the-sad-story-of-nasta-loika-human-rights-defender-behind-bars-in-belarus/]
As described in the statement, these stricter conditions mean confinement in a tiny 4-square-meter cell without privacy or proper sanitation:
Loika’s ongoing persecution is part of a broader crackdown on civil society in Belarus. A lawyer and educator, she has long been involved in documenting state abuses, challenging Belarus’s vague and punitive “anti-extremist” legislation, and advocating for migrants and stateless persons. Her organization, Human Constanta, was forcibly dissolved by the state in 2021 as part of an orchestrated campaign against human rights groups. It now operates in exile.
Nasta Loika has been imprisoned since June 2023, when the Minsk City Court sentenced her to seven years in prison, accusing her of “incitement to social enmity.” In a further act of repression, she was later added to the KGB’s list of individuals “involved in terrorist activities.” Her supporters have also been targeted: in May 2025, the Instagram page @let_nasta_go, which calls for her release, was declared “extremist.”
In early July 2025, a pro-government Telegram channel claimed Aliaksandr Lukashenka had pardoned Loika, publishing a photo of a handwritten pardon request. While her colleagues acknowledged the handwriting resembled hers, they could not confirm whether the letter was written freely or under coercion. Later, another Telegram channel associated with the Belarusian police dismissed the report as a hoax.
“Front Line Defenders is deeply appalled by the continued persecution of Nasta Loika,” the organization said in its statement. “The organisation condemns the use of strict conditions of detention as part of the reprisals against her for peaceful and legitimate human rights work. Front Line Defenders expresses grave concern about the inhumane conditions of detention the woman human rights defender is enduring and reiterates its call to the Belarus authorities to quash Nasta Loika’s conviction and facilitate her immediate release.”
Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards 