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DEFENDING THOSE WHO DEFEND OUR RIGHTS MARY LAWLOR Mary Lawlor, from Dublin, Ireland, has worked with human rights defenders for over 20 years, and has been engaged in human rights work for double that. She became a Board member of the Irish Section of Amnesty International in 1975, was elected Chair from 1983 -1987 and in 1988 became its Director. She founded Front Line Defenders in 2001 to focus specifically on the protection of human rights defenders at risk. As Executive Director from 2001-2016, Mary had a key role in the development of Front Line Defenders into the prominent international organisation it is today. On 1 May 2020, she took up the mandate of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders, where she has adopted a people-centred approach to the mandate.
I’m told I wrote a piece on human rights defenders nearly 30 years ago for this magazine’s first volume. I honestly can’t remember writing it, but it was a long time ago, and a lot has happened since. In 1992 I was with Amnesty International in Ireland, mobile phones were unheard of, and Whitney Houston was number one in Australia with “I Will Always Love You”. In the early 1990s we were struggling to have human rights defenders recognised by the UN as a specific category of people to be protected. Human rights defenders are those who work peacefully to protect the rights of others. The Declaration on Human Rights Defenders was eventually adopted by consensus by the General Assembly in 1998, after 14 long years of negotiations. My mandate, that of Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights Defenders, came into being in 2001, and I took up the position in May 2020. I’m the fourth person to hold this mandate – which is awarded for three years, and renewable once. My mandate is to work to protect human rights defenders at risk, and to promote their work in accordance with the 1998 UN Declaration. Many defenders work at great risk. In July 2019, the NGO Karapatan in the Philippines received a text message from
an unknown individual containing a death threat against Zara Alvarez, a woman human rights defender on its staff. In April 2020, a text message was sent to Ms. Alvarez, purportedly from State security forces, harassing her after she had distributed rice to impoverished members of her community during lockdowns enforced in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. On 17 August 2020, she was shot dead on the street in Bacolod City.
Every day I receive information from civil society about human rights violations against defenders, and I use this information to raise my concerns with governments in formal letters, called communications, which become public 60 days after being sent. I engage with UN member states, formally and informally, about the situation of human rights defenders in their countries through meetings, webinars and other events. In normal times, when travel is possible, I make two official visits to States annually to assess the situation for defenders there and write a report afterwards which includes recommendations to the government on how to better support and protect them.
