On Human Rights Defenders Day, Doug Specht reflects on the vital work of individuals around the world standing up for justice
In the Peruvian Amazon, a land defender moves through the forest with a GPS unit in hand, documenting illegal gold mining operations that are destroying indigenous territories and have already claimed the lives of colleagues. The coordinates she records are weapons, evidence that courts might recognise, that governments cannot ignore, that corporations fear. But they are also targets on her back. She knows the risks. She continues anyway. This is human rights defence: ordinary people in specific places choosing to protect rights despite extraordinary danger.
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Human Rights Defenders Day, marked each year on 9 December, commemorates the anniversary of the 1998 UN Declaration on Human Rights Defenders. Yet for most people, human rights defence remains abstract and distant, something that happens elsewhere, conducted by professional activists rather than recognised as the everyday work of journalists, lawyers, community organisers, indigenous leaders, trade unionists and ordinary citizens who stand up to injustice.
Who are human rights defenders?
Human rights defenders are people who work peacefully to protect and promote the rights of others. This work takes many forms. Defenders investigate torture and arbitrary detention, document discrimination and forced evictions, expose environmental destruction, support migration and refugee rights, challenge corruption, and advocate for women’s rights, LGBTIQ+ equality, indigenous rights and freedom of expression. They are lawyers filing strategic lawsuits, journalists investigating abuses, community organisers mobilising resistance, environmental scientists gathering evidence, and activists offering shelter and counsel to persecuted people.
They are not a special category. The 1998 UN Declaration on Human Rights Defenders affirmed that everyone has the right and responsibility to promote and protect human rights, and that States must create safe environments for this work. A farmer protecting ancestral territory is a defender. A teacher educating students about constitutional rights is a defender. A nurse documenting signs of torture is a defender. A mother speaking publicly about her disappeared child is a defender.
A world of risk
Because defenders expose abuses and challenge powerful interests, they face extraordinary risks. Land and environmental defenders experience the highest murder rates, particularly in Latin America, Southeast Asia and Central Africa, regions where resource extraction, deforestation and land disputes concentrate. These are not random killings scattered across the globe. They cluster in ‘resource frontiers’, zones where corporations and states push into previously protected or indigenous territories to extract minerals, timber, agricultural products or fossil fuels. In these zones of extraction, defenders who document environmental destruction or assert territorial rights become obstacles to be eliminated.
The threats defenders face are multifaceted. Physical violence is the most visible: killings, enforced disappearances, assault, kidnapping. But violence is only one tool. Defenders also face legal persecution through vague laws that criminalise dissent, laws targeting ‘terrorism’, ‘sedition’, foreign funding or ‘national security threats’, that transform legitimate human rights work into alleged criminal activity.
They experience digital surveillance and hacking, online harassment campaigns designed to intimidate, and doxxing that exposes them to violence. Economic pressure takes the form of job loss, frozen bank accounts, and denial of permits or licenses that stifle their work. Social stigmatisation and smear campaigns portray defenders as ‘anti-development’, ‘foreign agents’ or threats to the nation, justifying repression and isolating them from potential supporters.
Some defenders face compounded risks. Women defenders experience gender-based violence and harassment, including sexual assault and threats against family members, leveraging gender as a weapon to terrorise and control. LGBTIQ+ defenders face dangers in contexts where their identities are criminalised, facing violence both from state and non-state actors. Defenders in authoritarian states operate under constant surveillance and legal threat, with no institutional protections or rule of law to shield them. And increasingly, defenders face transnational repression: states pursuing activists even after they flee across borders, using technology and diplomatic pressure to threaten them globally.
Why their work matters
Human rights defenders serve as early warning systems for emerging crises, environmental destruction, human rights abuses, corruption, often documenting problems years before they gain international attention. Their geographic knowledge and embeddedness in communities make them uniquely positioned to detect and expose violations that distant observers miss.
They hold power accountable by gathering evidence that courts recognise, enabling strategic litigation that achieves real change in laws and practices. They document abuses for truth commissions and international investigations, creating historical records that prevent erasure and denial. They provide direct support to victims through legal aid, shelter, counselling and accompaniment, filling critical gaps where state protection is weak or absent. They educate communities about rights and how to claim them, strengthening democratic participation and more accountable governance.
Land and environmental defenders are frontline actors in humanity’s greatest crises, climate change and biodiversity loss. They protect forests, watersheds and ecosystems that benefit everyone, while indigenous defenders hold traditional knowledge essential for environmental stewardship and sustainable management. More fundamentally, defenders work toward geographic justice: challenging development models that concentrate benefits in wealthy regions and powerful hands while imposing environmental and social burdens on marginalised communities and the Global South.
Their work strengthens democracy by keeping civic space open, maintaining freedom of expression, assembly and association even under pressure. When authorities respond appropriately to defenders’ evidence, trust in institutions grows. When they repress defenders, corruption becomes visible. In an era of climate crisis, rising authoritarianism and deepening inequality, defenders’ work has never been more essential.
Human Rights Defenders Day
Human Rights Defenders Day (9 December) provides visibility for an often-invisible labour, celebrating defenders’ achievements and countering narratives that criminalise or delegitimise them. It creates a focal point for diplomatic pressure, enabling campaigns that call on governments to prevent attacks, investigate threats and end impunity for violence against defenders. International recognition offers moral support and a measure of protection, reminding defenders they are not alone and that their work is valued. The day reminds states of legal obligations under international law to protect defenders.
Yet recognition alone is insufficient. Fundamental changes remain necessary: stronger prosecution of those attacking defenders, corporate accountability for rights abuses in investment projects and supply chains, technology governance preventing surveillance tools’ misuse against defenders, and greater support from democratic states for defenders working in authoritarian contexts.
The core message is simple: protecting defenders protects everyone. Their work exposes abuses that threaten public welfare, challenges injustice that weakens societies, and protects environments and communities that belong to all of us.
In the Peruvian Amazon, the defender continues her work. Each GPS coordinate is an act of resistance. Each documented violation is an assertion that this territory, these people, this forest matter. On this Human Rights Defenders Day, and for all the days that follow, her courage, and that of thousands like her across the globe, deserves to be seen, honoured and protected.
