Human Rights Watch (HRW) is an international non-governmental organization, headquartered in New York City that conducts research and advocacy on human rights. The group pressures governments, policymakers, companies, and individual human rights abusers to denounce abuse and respect human rights, and often works on behalf of refugees, children, migrants, and political prisoners.
Gloria Marie Steinem is an American journalist and social-political activist who emerged as a nationally recognized leader of second-wave feminism in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
A peace walk or peace march, sometimes referred to as a peace pilgrimage, is a form of nonviolent action where a person or group marches a set distance to raise awareness for particular issues important to the walkers.
Irene Zubaida Khan is a Bangladeshi lawyer appointed as of August 2020 to be the United Nations Special Rapporteur for freedom of expression and opinion. She previously served as the seventh Secretary General of Amnesty International. In 2011, she was elected Director-General of the International Development Law Organization (IDLO) in Rome, an intergovernmental organization that works to promote the rule of law, and sustainable development. She was a consulting editor of The Daily Star in Bangladesh from 2010 to 2011.
The Human Rights Foundation (HRF) is a non-profit organization that focuses on promoting and protecting human rights globally, with an emphasis on closed societies. HRF organizes the Oslo Freedom Forum. The Human Rights Foundation was founded in 2005 by Thor Halvorssen Mendoza, a Venezuelan film producer and human rights advocate. The current chairman is Russian opposition activist Yulia Navalnaya, and Javier El-Hage is the current chief legal officer. The foundation's head office is in the Empire State Building in New York City.
Nazanin Boniadi is a British actress and activist. Born in Tehran and raised in London, she attended university in the United States, where she landed her first major acting role as Leyla Mir in the medical drama General Hospital (2007–2009) and its spin-off General Hospital: Night Shift (2007). Since then, Boniadi has played Nora in the sitcom How I Met Your Mother (2011), Fara Sherazi in the spy thriller series Homeland (2013–2014), Esther in the historical drama film Ben-Hur (2016), Clare Quayle in the sci-fi thriller series Counterpart (2017–2018), Zahra Kashani in the action thriller film Hotel Mumbai (2018), and Bronwyn in the first season of the fantasy series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (2022).
Wendy Ruth Sherman is an American diplomat who served as the United States deputy secretary of state from April 2021 to July 2023. She was a professor of the practice of public leadership and director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, a senior counselor at Albright Stonebridge Group, and a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.
Amnesty International is an international non-governmental organization focused on human rights, with its headquarters in the United Kingdom. The organization says it has more than ten million members and supporters around the world. The stated mission of the organization is to campaign for "a world in which every person enjoys all of the human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international human rights instruments." The organization has played a notable role on human rights issues due to its frequent citation in media and by world leaders.
Mary Kerry Kennedy is an American lawyer, author and human rights activist. She is a daughter of former United States Senator Robert F. Kennedy and Ethel Kennedy, and a niece of former U.S. President John F. Kennedy and former U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy.
Ginetta Sagan was an Italian-born American human rights activist best known for her work with Amnesty International on behalf of prisoners of conscience.
Baik Tae-Ung is a Professor of Law at the University of Hawaii at Manoa William S. Richardson School of Law in Honolulu, Hawaii. He is Director of the Center for Korean Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. A leading academic authority on transitional justice, social movement, and human rights in Asia, he specializes in international human rights law, comparative law, and Korean law. Baik is a well-known former South Korean prisoner of conscience.
Narges Mohammadi is an Iranian human rights activist and Nobel laureate. She is the vice president of the Defenders of Human Rights Center (DHRC), headed by her fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Shirin Ebadi. Mohammadi has been a vocal proponent of mass feminist civil disobedience against the hijab in Iran and a vocal critic of the hijab and chastity program of 2023. In May 2016, she was sentenced in Tehran to 16 years' imprisonment for establishing and running "a human rights movement that campaigns for the abolition of the death penalty." She was released in 2020 but sent back to prison in 2021, where she has since given reports of the abuse and solitary confinement of detained women.
Agnès Callamard is a French human rights activist who is the Secretary General of Amnesty International. She was previously the Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council, and the former Director of the Columbia University Global Freedom of Expression project.
Leyla Islam qizi Yunusova, better known as Leyla Yunus, is an Azerbaijani human rights activist who serves as the director of Institute of Peace and Democracy, a human rights organisation. She is particularly known for her work helping citizens affected by forced evictions in Baku, on whose behalf she organized several small protests.
May Sabai Phyu is a Kachin activist from Burma. She is active in promoting human rights, freedom of expression, peace, justice for Myanmar's ethnic minorities, anti-violence in Kachin State, and lately in combating violence against women and promoting gender equality issues.
Rosa Julieta Montaño Salvatierra is a Bolivian attorney, human rights defender, woman's rights activist, feminist writer and a 2015 winner of the US State Department's International Women of Courage Award.
Lee Hee-ho, sometimes spelled as Lee Hui-ho,, was a South Korean women's rights activist, peace advocate and former First Lady of South Korea during the presidency of her husband Kim Dae-jung from 1998 to 2003.
Wai Wai Nu is a Burmese activist who advocates for the rights and equality of all people in Myanmar, including the Rohingya. She was listed one of the BBC 100 Women in 2014. In 2017, she was named one of Time magazine's Next Generation Leaders.
Christine Ahn is a Korean-American peace activist who serves as the Executive Director of Women Cross DMZ, an organization of women advocating for an end to the Korean War. In 2015, she led 30 international women peacemakers across the De-Militarized Zone (DMZ) from North Korea to South Korea. She is also the 2020 winner of the US Peace Prize for her work for peace on the Korean peninsula and her advocacy for women's leadership in peace-building efforts.
Luis Carlos Díaz Vázquez is a Venezuelan journalist and cyberactivist. He has worked at the Instituto Radiofónico Fe y Alegría, the Centro Gumilla and newspapers such as El Nacional and Tal Cual, as well as a radio host at Circuito Unión Radio, and served as a member of the editorial board of SIC magazine. Luis Carlos was arbitrarily detained in 2019 by agents of the Bolivarian Intelligence Service (SEBIN) during the nationwide blackouts of that year, being declared by Amnesty International as a prisoner of conscience. He was released the following day with precautionary measures and his case was archived in 2021, suspending such measures.
