Global Citizenship for Human Rights - Human Rights Heroes

  CAO SHUNLI Cao Shunli (1962 – 14 March 2014) was a Chinese lawyer and human rights activist who lost her life in the struggle to build a more just society. As a result of this advocacy she was harassed, interrogated and detained on several occasions. Cao was born in Beijing, but during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1971) she was forcibly deported along with her family to their ancestral home in Zhaoyuan, Shandong Province as a result of her grandfather being a member of the "enemy classes" according to Communist Party of China doctrine of the time. After attending Beijing College of Political Science and Law and a period of post-graduate study she was assigned to work at the research centre of the Ministry of Labor and Human Resources. Cao’s human rights activism began in 2002 when she was fired from a government agency following her efforts to fight corruption in housing allocation. During the 2002 housing reforms, Cao reported corruption amongst her supervisors an

  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 September 2

  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 register wi