Global Citizenship for Human Rights - Human Rights Heroes

MUNIR SAID THALIB Munir Said (December 8, 1965 Malang, East Java - September 7, 2004), affectionately known simply as Munir, was one of Indonesia's most famous human rights and anti-corruption activists. Munir was assassinated in 2004 while travelling to Utrecht University to pursue a master's degree in international law and human rights. Munir was born into a family of Hadhrami Arab and Javanese origins, from Kathiri. He studied law at Brawijaya University in Malang in the province of East Java, and later started off his career in 1989 as a legal aid officer in the East Java provincial capital, Surabaya. Munir first came to public prominence at the end of the Suharto period through his role in the campaign that ensued when, in late 1997 and early ’98, two dozen pro-democracy activists were abducted in suspicious circumstances. At the height of this campaign, Munir founded the human rights organisation Kontras (Commission for Disappearances and Victims of Violence) with...

  NAJMEH VAHEDI AND HODA AMID Najmeh Vahedi is a sociologist and currently studying for her postgraduate degree in women’s studies and Hoda Amid is a lawyer. The two women human rights defenders ran educational workshops together on “terms of marriage” to educate women on their marital and familial legal rights in Iran. Hoda Amid is a lawyer and women’s rights defender, who had also played a prominent role in educating Iranian women of their rights. Najmeh Vahedi is a women’s rights defender and sociologist, currently studying for her postgraduate degree in women’s studies. She has been active in raising awareness on social issues in the field of women’s rights, especially the value of women's work in the home. As a human rights defenders they has been involved in organising and running educational workshops on "terms of marriage" to educate women on their marital and legal rights in Iran. Hoda Amid and Najmeh Vahedi have also been active in empowering women and...

  Eren Keskin (born 24 April 1959, Bursa, Turkey) is a lawyer and prominent human rights activist in Turkey. She is the Co-Chair of the Human Rights Association (İHD). She is also the founder of the Legal Aid Bureau against Sexual Harassment and Rape in Custody. Under the influence of her family, she grew up with a sympathy for leftist politics. Studying at the Faculty of Law of Istanbul University, she fulfilled her childhood dream of becoming a lawyer, and began taking on political cases. For more than thirty years, Keskin has struggled for fundamental rights and freedoms in Turkey, especially for the Kurds, women and the LGBTI+ community. Keskin has played a significant role in the establishment, activation, and strengthening of civil society structures in Turkey. In the early days of her career as a lawyer, she got involved with the Human Rights Association (İHD). For years, Keskin served as the president of the Association’s Istanbul branch, before becoming İHD’s vice...

  LIU XIAOBO Liu Xiaobo has been one of the major human rights activists of contemporary China, as well as a writer, a scholar and a professor. He was born in Changchun, a town located in the northern Chinese province of Jilin, in 1955. When he was a child, he experienced the turbulent years of the Cultural Revolution enacted by the father of the People’s Republic of China, Mao Zedong, and he was forced to move to a commune in Mongolia with his family. After a decade of social and political instability under Maoism, in 1976 he was part of the first generation of students to go to university after 10 years of closure. He studied Chinese literature, and after graduating at the Beijing Normal University he moved to the United States and became a professor at the Columbia University in New York. Here he met Perry Link, a Chinese literature expert who will help him to spread his ideas during his prison’s years. Liu represented that prominent group of Chinese intellectuals whose ...

  AUNG SAN SUU KYI Aung San Suu Kyi, also called Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, is born June 19, 1945, Rangoon, Burma (now Yangon, Myanmar). She is is the daughter of the liberation movement leader and national hero of independent Burma Aung San who struggled for   independence from colonial   rule and Khin Kyi and prominent Burmese diplomat. Aung San Suu Kyi was two years old when her father, was assassinated. She attended schools in Burma until 1960, when her mother was appointed ambassador to India. After attending high school in India, Suu Kyi studied philosophy, politics and economics at the University of Oxford, receiving a B.A. in 1967. Until 1988, when she returned to Burma to care for her dying mother, she and her husband lived a rather quiet life. In 1988, when Suu Kyi returned to Burma from abroad, it was amid the slaughter of protesters rallying against U Ne Win and his iron-fisted rule. She soon began speaking out publicly against him, with issues of democra...