Global Citizenship for Human Rights - Human Rights Heroes

  SAMAR BADAWI Samar Badawi was born in 1981 in Saudi Arabia. Samar Mohammad Badawi is a Saudi Arabian human rights activist. She began her struggle for human rights at a very young age. From 2008 – 2010, Samar challenged the male guardianship system when she tried leaving her abusive father and was charged with “disobedience.” In 2010   Samar filed a “Adhl” case against her father to remove him as her guardian so that she could marry human rights lawyer, Waleed Abu al-Khair. At the conclusion of her father’s countersuit for disobedience, she was arrested on April 4, 2010. The Saudi Arabian NGO Human Rights First Society declared her detainment “excessive and illegal.” With the help of local and international support campaigns, she was released on October 25, 2010, and her guardianship was transferred to her uncle. Badawi became involved in legal initiatives for women’s suffrage. When the voter registration center rejected her application prior to local elections in Se...

  MARTA PARDAVI Márta Pardavi is a human rights defender and co-chair of the Hungarian Helsinki Committee (HHC), a leading human rights organisation based in Budapest, founded in 1989. A lawyer by training, Márta Pardavi leads the organisation's work in the field of refugee protection. The HHC focuses on protecting the rights of asylum-seekers, refugees, stateless persons and other foreigners in need of international protection, as well as on monitoring the human rights performance of law enforcement agencies and the judicial system.   As co-chair of the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, a human rights group, Pardavi is one of the Hungarian government’s most prominent critics — and one of its primary targets. Márta Pardavi is an outspoken critic of the restrictive NGO legislation passed in Hungary in June 2017, which is reminiscent of ‘foreign agent’ laws in Russia and Israel. The law targets NGOs which receive more than 24,000 USD in foreign donations and who fail to regist...

  LIDIA YUSUPOVA Lidia Yusupova is a Chechen lawyer and human rights activist hailed by the BBC as “the bravest woman in Europe.” Yusupova was born September 15, 1961 in Grozny, Soviet Union to a Russian mother and a Chechen father and studied literature at the Karachevo-Cherkeski Institute. She soon earned a law degree from the Chechen University of Grozny where she later became a lecturer. Lidia Yusupova is the Coordinator of the Moscow-based human rights organization ‘Memorial’ and the former director of its Grozny office. She is an internationally recognized human rights defender known for her defense of Chechnya’s victims of war and internally displaced refugees. Between 1994 and 1996, Lidia experienced the atrocities of the First Chechen War, and what she saw had a lasting effect on Yusupova’s character – she witnessed the loss of many friends, colleagues and family members. It was during the following Chechen war in 2000 that she began to devote herself to human ...

  AURA LOLITA CHAVEZ IXCAQUIC Aura Lolita Chávez Ixcaquic (born 1972), known as Lolita, is a is a human rights, women's rights activist and Guatemalan indigenous leader, an international leader in the struggle to preserve natural resources. She is a member of the Council of the Ki’che Populations (CPK), an organization founded in 2007, to face the consequences of the free trade agreement between the Dominican Republic and Central America. She, and the organisation she represents, fight for the rights of the Maya Quiché people and the preservation of the ecosystem in which they have lived for millennia against the expansion of the mining, logging, hydro-electric and farming industries in the land. The Ki’ches symbolize the struggle for environmental human rights in today’s world. They have been subject to a genocidal campaign made of rapes, deaths, cultural alienation and the grab of their lands during the civil war of Guatemala (1960-1996). The present and past violations o...