A chair stood empty at the launch here Monday of a report on the repression of human rights defenders, a physical reminder that its would-be occupant – Ales Bialiatski, president of Human Rights Centre Viasna in Belarus – has been languishing in prison since August.

U.N. Special Rapporteur Margaret Sekaggaya underscored the importance of implementing the Declaration for Human Rights Defenders. Credit: UN Photo/Jean-Marc Ferré

A three-time nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize, Bialiatski is charged with tax evasion, but supporters say it is clear that the charges are in retaliation for his long and distinguished career of human rights activism in the country.

The chair was also empty for the hundreds of other human rights defenders across the world who have been deprived of their freedom and fundamental rights, leaving a void in the communities they worked to protect.

The Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders is a joint programme by the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) and the World Organisation against Torture (OMCT).

Its aim is to prevent or remedy crackdowns on human rights defenders through actions such as legal assistance on the ground and by issuing an alert mechanism to mobilise intervention by the international community.

The over 600-page report details examples of individual human rights defenders and organisations that faced repression between January 2010 and April 2011. It covers 70 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa, the Middle East, Asia, The Americas and Europe.

The abuses cited include attacks and harassment, threats and arrests, arbitrary detention, defamation campaigns, and restrictions in terms of freedoms of association and expression.

The report is based on information OMCT and FIDH received from their members, human rights organisations around the world, who in turn have contact with 400 independent domestic organisations on the ground.

Antoine Bernard, the chief executive officer of FIDH, told IPS that the Observatory’s report doesn’t “pretend to be exhaustive”, but rather highlights broad trends that emerge from the cases FIDH and OMCT have worked on during the year.

“The major trend this year relates to the criminalisation of social protests,” he said. “That is a very universal trend, to use the law not as a protecting tool, that is supposed to be its role, but law as a repressive tool to arbitrarily provide the legal basis for silencing human rights defenders.”

He also cited ongoing impunity for these repressive tactics as a universal trend.

With the launch of the report, Bernard said that FIDH and OMCT call on governments to meet their responsibility to protect human rights defenders, as well as on other non-state actors, and to strengthen international support mechanisms.

The United Nations special rapporteur on the situation for human rights defenders, Margaret Sekaggaya, underscored the importance of implementing the Declaration for Human Rights Defenders that the General Assembly adopted back in 1998, and the importance of disseminating information about it.

The declaration is not legally binding in itself, but articulates rights laid out in other legally binding treaties, in a way that makes it easier to apply these rights to the context of human rights defenders’ situation. For example, it mentions the right to access funding, which is something that many countries have put restrictions on.

“It is still an instrument that is not sufficiently known, either to those who should shoulder the main responsibility for its implementation, namely states, or to those whose rights it sets out to protect, human rights defenders,” Sekaggaya said.

But of course, it is not always in governments’ interests to implement and disseminate this information, she added, makes the task very difficult.

The example of Syria

More than 3,000 Syrians are believed to have been killed since pro- democracy protests erupted in March this year, but the figure could be much higher. Many international organisations have condemned the Syrian government’s brutality against the protesters.

Earlier this month, the U.N. Security Council failed to adopt a Western-sponsored draft resolution that strongly condemned the Syrian government’s violent crackdown, when Russia and China vetoed it.

“The number of the people who have been detained nobody knows exactly, we have an estimated number that more than 30,000 have been detained,” said Dr. Radwan Ziadeh, the executive director of the Washington-based Syrian Center for Political and Strategic Studies and director of the Damascus Centre for Human Rights studies in Syria, who attended the launch.

Since the revolution started, Ziadeh and his organisation have been in contact with a network of activists in Syria who have reported on the situation from underground, because they don’t have the regime’s permission to operate legally.

He said authorities have taken family members hostage to send a message to human rights activists. Ziadeh’s brother is in prison because of Ziadeh’s efforts to promote human rights, as well as an uncle and three of his cousins, one of them just 14 years old. They have all been detained, and he has no information about them, he told the audience with a voice that quavered with emotion.

“The Syrian regime actually cancelled the football championship because they turned over all the soccer fields to be detention centres and torture centres… It’s almost like the Nazi regime practices, having thousands of thousands of political prisoners in detention centres,” Ziadeh said.

“This is why any delay of the actions of the Security Council unfortunately makes the situation much more difficult, and much more open to options none of the Syrians like to have in Syria, like civil war,” he added.

FIDH consists of 164 member human rights organisations around the world and OMCT is a coalition of international non-governmental organisations that “fight against torture, summary execution, enforced disappearances and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment”.

“A threat to a human rights defender very often transcends beyond the individual case, it carries a shadow to society at large,” concluded Gerald Staberock, secreterary-general of OMCT.

And this leaves the world with far too many empty chairs.

Ninety percent of the non-governmental organisations in Mexico are founded and run by women, says journalist and women’s rights activist Lydia Cacho Ribeiro, even as crimes against women remain cloaked in impunity.

Lydia Cacho Ribeiro receives death threats on a regular basis. Credit: Melanie Haider/IPS

Cacho was recently in New York, where she was awarded the Civil Courage award from the Train Foundation, and also spoke at a special event hosted by Columbia University.

When Felipe Calderón became president in 2006, he deployed the military in a federal offensive against drug cartels and criminal groups, resulting in a virtual war in which more than 40,000 people have died. In 2010 alone, the death toll exceeded 15,000, according to Reporters Without Borders.

Human rights abuses and violence against women are widespread in Mexico, perpetrated by all actors in society, including the military and police.

Nine out of 10 women in Mexico who suffer human rights violations do not report it to the authorities, and “those who (do) report them are generally met with suspicion, apathy and disrespect”, according to Human Rights Watch’s latest country report.

“The normalisation of gender violence is increasing incredibly,” Cacho said.

Even though some legal measures have been put in place to prevent and punish gender-based violence, the implementation has been very limited and impunity remains the norm for murder or other crimes against women, according to human rights groups.

However, Cacho stressed that there is a growing feminist movement in Mexico to empower women and to discuss gender violence, including that perpetrated by the military.

“The problem right now in Mexico, regarding this discussion, is that the Mexican government is so obsessed with the media, with the main media that is pretty much linked with war discourse, that everything has to do with the war against drugs. And they won’t talk about human rights (even) if we want to take back the conversation about gender violence,” she said.

The issue is especially difficult since many of the same people responsible for public safety are also responsible for human rights violations.

Cacho said the military is involved in abuses such as human trafficking, and police occasionally attack women’s shelters, either because they have a personal connection to a woman in the shelter or because they want to protect the traffickers.

Ten years ago, she founded such a shelter for women and their children who are fleeing various kinds of gender violence, called the Women’s Assistance Centre (Centro Integral de Atención a la Mujer) in Cancún. It started mainly as a refuge for victims of domestic violence, but it soon became clear that most of the women had been involved in trafficking, especially forced prostitution.

The centre now has high security, with a barbed wire fence and cameras everywhere to keep the women safe.

Cacho recounted how the shelter was attacked by police who came to retrieve the wife of a policeman, whom she had helped to flee an abusive situation. The police didn’t get inside, and the attack was caught on film, but when Cacho sought accountability and showed the tape to the district attorney, she said he told her “that there isn’t much we can do, (and) the best thing you can do is just to close down”.

Perseverance in the face of death threats

In the last decade, 80 journalists have been killed in Mexico, according to Reporters Without Borders, and many journalists and human rights defenders have been forced to flee the country or censor themselves.

Cacho chose to do neither. She has investigated gender violence and sex trafficking and published numerous stories and books on the subject. Her 2005 book “The Demons of Eden” exposed an international child pornography and sex trafficking ring in Cancún which involved senators and politicians.

She was thrown in jail and tortured for publishing that book. When she finally came out and started talking, the government tried to label her a terrorist, but without success. She traveled for six years to investigate the world of international sex trafficking of women, resulting in her latest book “The Slaves of Power” in 2010.

Together with non-governmental organisations and a grassroots activist network, Cacho started a prevention campaign called “No estoy en venta” – “I am not for sale” – against sex trafficking that includes a video to give young people tools they need to protect themselves. The video explains anti-trafficking laws, the tactics traffickers use to lure their victims, and other aspects of the issue.

“It is getting away from discourse of fear and moral panic and all this (crap) and going back to the discourse of ‘you have the power of the information, use it for your own good and how to protect yourself and other kids in school’,” she stressed.

But her fight has not come without a price. Cacho told IPS that she has a lengthy checklist of safety strategies she must adhere to in her daily life because of the threats she receives, such as using a different name to make hotel reservations when she travels and constantly switching phone cards.

“I guess right now in Mexico my biggest challenge is to stay alive,” she said.

She could have given in to fear and stopped doing what she does, after being tortured and having survived a murder attempt in her car while she was driving with friends and her husband, but she chose another path.

“I guess one day I just understood that, one of the things they do, like the mobsters, the government officials… is to put a lot of pressure for me to live in such a state of fear,” she said.

“So one day I said, what the hell, they won’t be able to do it. It’s just the last of my liberties is that, is my freedom. If they take away my job, and the way I am as a citizen and as an activist, they would be taking my freedom away, and I won’t let them.”

If women farmers were given more tools and resources, the number of hungry people in the world could be slashed by 100 to 150 million.

This was the message conveyed by Josette Sheeran, executive director of the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP), at an event on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly Thursday to empower rural women for food security and nutrition.

In October, the Committee on World Food Security will meet at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) headquarters in Rome, followed by the 56th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) next year, both opportunities to increase the role of rural women in alleviating poverty and hunger.

The event this week was co-sponsored by UN Women, the United Nations entity for Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment, and WFP, among others.

Representatives from government, grassroots community organisations and the private sector were on hand to embody the “new coalition that has to come together to make a difference”, as Sheeran put it.

Paul Polman, chief executive officer of Unilever, cited the new Project Laser Beam initiative in which the WFP and its corporate partners, DSM, the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), Kraft Foods and Unilever, came together to combat child malnutrition in Bangladesh and India.

“Interestingly, in that programme, most of the focus is on women, agriculture, creating smallholder farmers, health and hygiene programmes, hand washing, women in school. It is not surprising to me because we have all discovered, businessmen as we are, that we will probably get a higher return from those investments than others we make,” Polman said.

UN Women and the Coca-Cola company also announced a new partnership this week to break down the barriers faced by women entrepreneurs through programmes on the ground that provide access to skills training and financial services.

The 2010-2011 State of Food and Agriculture report, published by FAO, found that women, when they have additional income, spend more of it on food, health, clothing and education for their children than men. This in turn has an impact on economic growth through improved health, nutrition and education.

According to the FAO report, women across regions have fewer productive resources than men, such as education, land, livestock, technology, labour, financial services and more.

“If women would have the same productive resources as men,” the report noted, “this could raise the total agricultural output in developing countries by 2.5-4 percent” and “reduce the number of hungry people in the world by 12-17 percent”.

Anne Itto, a farmer and former caretaker minister of agriculture and forestry in South Sudan, spoke with IPS about women’s food security in her country.

“There are people who don’t have enough to eat and then immediate food aid may be necessary,” she said, adding that the aid should be well-targeted so that the “food does not end up in the local market” where it depresses prices.

“For those who still have capacity and you want to work long-term, number one is training, giving the necessary knowledge and the skills for women, and then creating access to agricultural inputs such as improved seeds, better technology and better equipment,” she said. ” (But) they can’t get it unless they also have access to financial services.”

Itto underscored the importance of linking women to the market, as “most grain cannot store for more than two three months.”

She said that enabling women to borrow money can have a positive impact on food security because then they can pay for better seeds, and tools, they can also produce more.

“I believe that women have done their job,” she said. “(Now) it is the job of governments, humanitarian actors, the private sector to come and really build a very strong partnership with them so that they can continue to feed themselves, their children, and also contribute to nation-building.”