Responding to the release of Dorgelesse Nguessan, a single mother and hairdresser arbitrarily arrested in 2020 for participating in a peaceful protest, Marceau Sivieude, Amnesty International’s interim Regional Director for West and Central Africa, said:
“Our medicines, our berries, our food, the animals, our water, our culture, are all here since time immemorial. We are obligated to protect our ways of life for our babies unborn.” These are the words of Sleydo’, a member of the Indigenous Wetʼsuwetʼen Nation, who lives on land inhabited by her ancestors for thousands of years.
In recent years, Saudi Arabia’s authorities have claimed they are advancing women’s rights in the Kingdom. Thirty-year-old Manahel al-Otaibi believed these promises and felt freer to express her views and wear what she liked. Now, facing over a decade behind bars, these promises are utterly hollow.
Before Kyung Seok Park developed paraplegia following a hang-gliding accident in August 1983, he never thought about the lives of people with disabilities. He was 22 years old and busy studying at university, playing guitar and having fun with friends. When Kyung Seok attempted to live as a person with a disability, he soon found daily life for people with disabilities in South Korea was unacceptably difficult, even dangerous. His life as an activist began.
Twenty-nine-year-old ceramicist Joel Paredes lives in Humahuaca, a small town in Jujuy, a northern Argentine province. In June 2023 the local government pushed through changes to the province’s constitution, including restrictions on the right to peaceful assembly, as well as measures that may cause damage to the environment, and risk violating Indigenous Peoples’ land rights. The changes were approved without consultation with Indigenous Peoples or the wider population.
Environmental justice lawyer Dang Dinh Bach has dedicated his life to improving the health and livelihoods of people in Viet Nam and protecting them from the threats of pollution and climate change.
Leaders at the COP28 climate summit in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) must place human rights at its heart by agreeing to rapidly phase out fossil fuels, ensure civil society’s full and free participation in the meeting, and press the Emirati government to release dissidents from jail, said Amnesty International, ahead of its Secretary General Agnès Callamard’s participation at the conference.
An elderly white woman was murdered in a predominantly Black neighbourhood. Rocky, who is Black, lived across the street. Despite no evidence linking him to the scene of the murder, except for a video cassette recorder belonging to the victim which Rocky maintains he found abandoned in the street, Rocky was convicted of the crime.
As general secretary of Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM), a vibrant and courageous grassroots movement, Thapelo has dedicated his life to fighting for the rights of people across South Africa, particularly in areas suffering economic hardship.
The Myanmar military unleashed ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya – an ethnic minority who have faced decades of severe state-sponsored discrimination in Myanmar. Thousands of Rohingya were killed, raped, tortured, and their villages burned.
In his short life, Pedro Henrique achieved a lot. An activist and advocate of racial justice and human rights, Pedro Henrique organized “Walks of Peace” in Tucano, Bahia, Brazil. These annual marches brought people together to speak out about police abuses primarily against Black communities.
Rising sea levels are causing more destruction each year by eroding beaches, destroying sacred cultural sites and cemeteries where ancestors are buried, wrecking food gardens, and putting the island’s’ infrastructure at risk.