Global Citizenship for Human Rights - Human Rights Heroes

  KARLA AVELAR Karla Avelar (born 1978) is a Salvadoran transgender rights activist. She is the Executive Director of Comcavis Trans. Karla, was born in El Salvador, into a deeply Catholic and poor family. The lack of education and the oppressive conservative environment resulted in continuous abuse and finally rape. When she was nine years old, she fled to the capital city where she lived on the streets, being and exposed to increasing violence, crime and drug abuse. At the age of eleven, Karla was forced to engage in sex work and soon became a victim of sexual violence, extortion, and death threats by gang members, police officers, and clients. The first assassination attempt to her life was in 1992, when she was just a teen, she was able to disarm her assailant who drew a .45 at Avelar. In 1993, a serial killer who was an active officer of the armed forces shot her nine times, causing severe life threatening injuries resulting in a two month coma. While recovering, she was...

  AHMED MANSOOR AL SHEHHI Ahmed Mansoor is the UAE’s most celebrated human rights activist. Prior to his arest, Mansoor had dedicated over a decade of his life to advocating for human rights in his country and the wider Middle East and North Africa region, undeterred by multiple earlier government attempts to silence him. He is one of the few voices within the United Arab Emirates (UAE) who provides a credible independent assessment of human rights developments in the country. He regularly raisesed concerns on arbitrary detention, torture or ill or degrading treatment, failure to meet international standards for fair trials, non-independence of the judiciary, domestic laws that violate internationallaw, and other violations of civil rights. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and Master of Science in Telecommunications from the University of Colorado Boulder in the United States. In 2012, during his third year of law school, he was physically attacked and had...

  LOUJAIN AL-HATHLOUL   Loujain Al-Hathloul is a Saudi Arabian woman human rights activist. She is a leading advocate for the promotion of gender equality and women’s rights in Saudi Arabia. Loujain was born on 31 July 1989 in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. After spending 5 years in Jeddah, Loujain’s family moved to France for 5 years after which they returned to Saudi Arabia. In Saudi Arabia, Loujain studied at Dar Al-Ulum until her graduation and moved to Canada to pursue her Bachelors in French Literature. Loujain graduated from the University of British Columbia in 2013. After her Bachelors, Loujain worked and started her MA in social research at Sorbonne University in Abu-Dhabi. Much of her activism is conducted via commentary on social media. She was one of the key figures of the Women to Drive movement, which called for the abolition of the driving ban for women, including posting videos of herself driving as part of a 2013 campaign. She also advocated for the end of the...

  GUADALUPE VAZQUEZ LUNA Guadalupe Vázquez Luna, also known as Lupita, is an activist from Mexico and part of the Tsotsil community, representing the Alto-Centro region in Chiapas as a member of the Indigenous Council of Government. She is also the first Tsotsil woman to receive a baton from the Las Abejas, a Mayan Christian activist group. She is a survivor of the Acteal massacre, which killed her mother, father, five brothers, grandmother, and uncle. She advocates for solutions to issues such as violence, forced disappearances, and other human rights violations. She encourages others to collaborate and join forces, especially as the government fails to protect indigenous communities. Lupita’s experience is filled with political violence and discrimination as she engages in activism as an indigenous woman.   Political violence changed Lupita’s life at 10 years old, when the Acteal massacre occurred. Prior to the Acteal massacre, she remembers a relatively happy childhood, g...