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.
Shirin Ebadi is an Iranian political activist, lawyer, a former judge and human rights activist and founder of Defenders of Human Rights Center in Iran. On 10 October 2003, Ebadi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her significant and pioneering efforts for democracy and human rights, especially women's, children's, and refugee rights.
Reporters Without Borders is an international non-profit and non-governmental organization with the stated aim of safeguarding the right to freedom of information. It describes its advocacy as founded on the belief that everyone requires access to the news and information, in line with Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that recognizes the right to receive and share information regardless of frontiers, along with other international rights charters. RSF has consultative status at the United Nations, UNESCO, the Council of Europe, and the International Organisation of the Francophonie.
The Iranian student protests of July 1999 were, before the 2009 Iranian election protests, the most widespread and violent public protests to occur in Iran since the early years of the Iranian Revolution.
Akbar Ganji is an Iranian journalist, writer and a former member of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. He has been described as "Iran's preeminent political dissident", and a "wildly popular pro-democracy journalist" who has crossed press censorship "red lines" regularly. A supporter of the Islamic revolution as a youth, he became disenchanted in the mid-1990s and served time in Tehran's Evin Prison from 2001 to 2006, after publishing a series of stories on the murder of dissident authors known as the Chain Murders of Iran. While in prison, he issued a manifesto which established him as the first "prominent dissident, believing Muslim and former revolutionary" to call for a replacement of Iran's theocratic system with "a democracy". He has been described as "Iran's best-known political prisoner".
The state of human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran has been criticized by Iranians and international human rights activists, by writers, and NGOs. The United Nations General Assembly and the Human Rights Commission have condemned prior and ongoing abuses in Iran in published critiques and several resolutions. The government is criticized both for restrictions and punishments that follow the Islamic Republic's constitution and law, and for "extrajudicial" actions by state actors, such as the torture, rape, and killing of political prisoners, and the beatings and killings of dissidents and other civilians. Capital punishment in Iran remains a matter of international concern.
Human rights education (HRE) is the learning process that seeks to build up knowledge, values, and proficiency in the rights that each person is entitled to. This education teaches students to examine their own experiences from a point of view that enables them to integrate these concepts into their values, decision-making, and daily situations. According to Amnesty International, HRE is a way to empower people, training them so their skills and behaviors will promote dignity and equality within their communities, societies, and throughout the world.
Abdolfattah Soltani is an Iranian human rights lawyer and spokesman for the Defenders of Human Rights Center. He co-founded the group with Mohammad Seifzadeh and Nobel Peace Prize-winner Shirin Ebadi. Along with Ebadi, Soltani served as a lawyer for the family of slain Iranian-Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi, who was allegedly tortured and murdered in Evin Prison in July 2003. Ebadi and Soltani, along with others, also represented jailed journalist Akbar Ganji during his imprisonment and long hunger strike. Soltani, who won the Nuremberg International Human Rights Award, in 2009, served time in prison in 2005 and 2009, and was sentenced to 18-year prison sentence in 2012.
A human rights defender or human rights activist is a person who, individually or with others, acts to promote or protect human rights. They can be journalists, environmentalists, whistleblowers, trade unionists, lawyers, teachers, housing campaigners, participants in direct action, or just individuals acting alone. They can defend rights as part of their jobs or in a voluntary capacity. As a result of their activities, human rights defenders (HRDs) are often subjected to reprisals including smears, surveillance, harassment, false charges, arbitrary detention, restrictions on the right to freedom of association, physical attack, and even murder. In 2020, at least 331 HRDs were murdered in 25 countries. The international community and some national governments have attempted to respond to this violence through various protections, but violence against HRDs continues to rise. Women human rights defenders and environmental human rights defenders face greater repression and risks than human rights defenders working on other issues.
The Defenders of Human Rights Center is an Iranian human rights organization.
One Million Signatures for the Repeal of Discriminatory Laws, also known as Change for Equality, is a campaign by women in Iran to collect one million signatures in support of changing discriminatory laws against women in their country.
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.
The Campaign for Peace and Democracy (CPD) was a socialist, New York City-based organization that promoted "a new, progressive and non-militaristic U.S. foreign policy," in contrast to existing foreign policy, which CPD characterized as "based on domination, militarism, fear of popular struggles, enforcement of an inequitable and cruel global economy and persistent support for authoritarian regimes." The hallmark of CPD's work was its efforts to seek out and work with dissidents and social justice movements worldwide, and to forge alliances between them and progressive movements in the United States. The organization had more than 100 endorsers, including Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, and Daniel Ellsberg.
Payam Akhavan is an Iranian-born lawyer. He is a Member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague. He is a senior fellow at Massey College at the University of Toronto and is a visiting adjunct at the school's Faculty of Law. He is also a senior fellow at the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights.
The Ashura protests were a series of protests which occurred on 27 December 2009 in Iran against the outcome of the June 2009 Iranian presidential election, which demonstrators claim was rigged. The demonstrations were part of the 2009 Iranian election protests and were the largest since June. In December 2009, the protests saw an escalation in violence.
The Mourning Mothers are a group of Iranian women whose spouses or children were killed by government agents in the protests following the disputed Iranian presidential election of 2009. The group also includes relatives of victims of earlier human rights abuses, including mass executions during the 1980s. The principal demand of the Mourning Mothers is government accountability for the deaths, arrests, and disappearances of their children. The mothers meet on Saturdays in Laleh Park in Tehran, and are often chased by the police and arrested.
Durban III is an informal name for a high-level United Nations General Assembly meeting marking the 10th anniversary of the adoption of The Durban Declaration and Programme of Action that was held in New York City on 22 September 2011. It was mandated by United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) resolution 64/148 of 18 December 2009 to commemorate the World Conference against Racism 2001, and given additional form and visibility by a UNGA Third Committee draft resolution adopted on 24 November 2010. It followed the Durban Review Conference, the official name of the 2009 United Nations World Conference Against Racism (WCAR), also known as Durban II.
The 2011 Khuzestan protests, known among protesters as the Ahvaz Day of Rage, relates to violent protests, which erupted on 15 April 2011 in Khuzestan Province, to mark an anniversary of the 2005 Ahvaz unrest, and as a response to the regional Arab Spring. The protests lasted for 4 days and resulted in 12 to 15 protesters killed and many wounded and arrested. 1 security officer was killed as well, and another wounded. Crackdown on Arab political opposition in the area continued since with arrests and executions.
Narges Mohammadi is an Iranian human rights activist and the vice president of the Defenders of Human Rights Center (DHRC), headed by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi. 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". In 2022, she was named in the BBC 100 Women list.
Soraya Darabi is an Iranian teacher, journalist and trade union activist. She was editor of the Teacher's Pen Weekly Paper and vice president of the Iran Teachers Trade Association (ITTA).
