Some States use travel bans as a reprisal against human rights defenders who cooperate with the United Nations. These acts of retaliation are designed to isolate, intimidate, and silence them. Join us in our campaign to #EndReprisals and end travel bans against defenders.
A travel ban may be less visible than a prison cell, but its impact is deeply damaging. It restricts defenders from attending UN meetings, carrying out their work, reuniting with family or seeking international protection.
Travel bans take many forms. These include cancelling or confiscating passports, detaining defenders attempting to exit a country, denying defenders entry back into the country, and placing defenders on terrorist lists.
As reprisals evolve, what started as detention can turn into surveillance, harassment, or restrictions on movement.
This is what happened to Loujain and Mohamed, prominent human rights defenders from Saudi Arabia and Egypt respectively. After unjustly spending years in arbitrary detention, they were ‘freed’, but important conditions on that freedom remained in place: Loujain is under a travel ban and cannot leave Saudi Arabia. Mohamed was granted a presidential pardon but is still listed on a terrorist list, preventing him from traveling.
Meanwhile, Anexa, an Indigenous human rights defender, is unable to return to her home country of Nicaragua, and Kadar from Djibouti had his passport confiscated since 2018, preventing him from leaving the country and doing his work.
In all of those cases, the intent of the governments is the same — to punish defenders for daring to speak out at the UN and to deter others from doing the same.
Through this campaign, we share their stories. These are not just cases of reprisals — they are real lives disrupted, silenced, and confined. But they are also stories of resilience and perseverance for social change.
Loujain is an iconic figure in Saudi Arabia’s women’s rights movement. She has actively campaigned for women’s rights in the country and against the driving ban imposed on women. She has also publicly and consistently called for the dismantlement of the male guardianship system.
Loujain was listed in the Times 100 most influential women of 2019, which described her “fearless, longtime efforts” as the foundation for change in legislation allowing women to drive.
Her sister Lina describes Loujain as: “genuinely caring person, who is spontaneous, and lives with her whole heart. Although she has spent most of her years struggling to live in dignity, she remains as joyful and resilient as she has always been. Loujain has suffered far too much and deserves to be unconditionally free.”
In February 2018, Loujain came to Geneva to brief members of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) on human rights situation of women in Saudi Arabia. Three months after her engagement with the UN treaty body, Loujain was arrested and arbitrary detained.
In December 2020, Loujain was sentenced under national security related charges. After more than 1000 days in detention, she was released following the end of her sentence but continues to face three years of probation and a five-year travel ban.
Her latest attempt to have the travel ban lifted was rejected on appeal, meaning Loujain currently has no legal remedy against this illegal travel ban anymore.
Additionally, after Loujain’s trip to the UN in 2018, her family was also put on a travel ban. Some members of the family residing outside the country found themselves trapped in Saudi Arabia as they were unaware of the ban imposed on them.
We want the Saudi government to lift Loujain’s travel ban, as well as the ones imposed on members of her family. We want States to hold their peer accountable and publicly name Loujain’s case, also showing solidarity for her and her family.
Mohamed El-Baqer is a human rights lawyer from Egypt. He is the director of the Adalah Center for Rights and Freedoms, founded in 2014. It is a non-governmental, independent legal and human rights organisation with a focus on four Programmes: 1) Criminal Justice 2) Student Rights and Academic Freedoms; 3) Refugees; 4) and Minorities. All these Programmes are implemented through legal support and strategic litigation, research, monitoring and documentation, advocacy activities and capacity-building.
Mohamed is known for his relentless advocacy to protect and empower rights, freedom and justice for all and has received several prestigious awards, recognising his work as a human rights lawyer and commitment to the rule of law.
For the Universal Periodic Review of Egypt in 2019, Mohamed’s organisation submitted several joint reports highlighting the human rights situation in the country.
Mohamed was arrested from the prosecution’s premises while carrying out his professional activities in 2019. He was arbitrarily detained on terrorism and national security charges.
He spent four years in prison in Egypt before being released in July 2023 after being granted a presidential pardon.
Nonetheless, his name was listed on a terrorism list in November 2020 for 5 years. This means that despite being released in 2023, Mohamed remains on a travel ban and his assets have been frozen. He is also banned from doing any civil work until next November.
While Mohamed’s name should be removed from the list next November, he remains at risk of the court’s decision to list him again for another 5 years.
Travel bans in Egypt take three different forms:
1) Listing on the terrorist list: as in the case of Mohamed – this list includes more than 4’000 people who have different legal situations)
2) Public Prosecutor’s order of travel ban and/or assets freeze which has no time limit
3) Travel Ban at the airport without any formal legal reason
We want the Egyptian government to remove Mohamed from the terrorist list. We want States to hold their peer accountable and publicly name Mohamed’s case, also showing solidarity for him.
Anexa Alfred Cunningham is a Miskitu Indigenous leader, woman human rights defender, lawyer and expert on Indigenous Peoples’ rights from Nicaragua. She defends the ancestral land and natural resources of Indigenous and Afro-descendant Peoples of the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua. She has also worked with Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities to investigate the many abuses they suffer and denounce them to the United Nations. These Peoples face attacks by armed groups who seek to take away their ancestral territory with the State’s approval.
In July 2022, after participating for the first time in a session of a group of United Nations experts on the rights of Indigenous Peoples, where she sits as one of the experts, the authorities of Nicaragua denied her entry into her home country.
The airline, under the orders of the Nicaraguan government, prevented Anexa from boarding her return flight and reaching her ancestral land. She remains in a situation of unlawful, forced exile from her own community since.
We want Anexa to be free to go back to her home land and community. We want her to continue her important work as a human rights defender and resume her activities for Indigenous Peoples in Nicaragua.
Kadar Abdi Ibrahim is a human rights defender and journalist from Djibouti. He has drawn inspiration from historic figures in the human rights movement in the hopes of building a solid and lasting democracy in his country.
From 2015, Kadar was the co-director and chief editor of L’Aurore, Djibouti’s only privately-owned media outlet. In 2016, the newspaper was banned following the publication of a story on one of the victims of the Buldhuqo massacre, crackdown by Djibouti security forces on a religious celebration and a meeting of the opposition on 21 December 2015 that left at least 27 people dead. Kadar is also the president of the political party Movement for Democracy and Freedom (MoDEL) since December 2021. Over the years, Kadar has been arrested several times by the police in an attempt to silence him.
In April 2018, just days after returning from Geneva, where Kadar carried out advocacy activities ahead of Djibouti’s Universal Periodic Review (UPR) at the UN Human Rights Council, intelligence service agents of the Service de documentation et de sécurité (SDS) raided his house and confiscated his passport.
Despite his case being identified as a clear case of reprisals by the UN Secretary-General, who reported on it to the Human Rights Council in 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023, his passport remains with the SDS. He has been unable to leave his own country for the past seven years. The prolongation of the travel ban obstructs Kadar from undertaking his human rights work and prevents him from directly engaging with partners and actors outside the country, including the UN.
We want the authorities in Djibouti to lift the travel ban against Kadar and return his passport so he can travel, engage with partners and the UN outside of Djibouti and undertake his human rights work without any obstacles.
You can join our campaign by:
Signing our petition to the Secretary-General and his office so they include all four cases in the 2025 report on reprisals.
We want travel bans against Loujain, Mohamed, Anexa and Kadar to be lifted so they can continue their work, including their engagement with the United Nations, and in some cases be reunited with their families.
For this to happen, States must hold their peers accountable.
When intimidation and reprisals against human rights defenders occur, we want the UN to effectively address these cases, support the victims and push for accountability and redress.
We call on States to publicly condemn reprisals and intimidation against those who engage with the UN, and raise specific cases of victims at the Human Rights Council in Geneva and the General Assembly in New York.
We mobilise diplomatic missions, encouraging them to speak out and raise individual cases of reprisals against defenders at the UN and in other spaces and hold their peers to account.
We convince the UN Secretary General and his team to acknowledge and document ALL cases of reprisal and intimidation by including them in his annual report on reprisals and intimidation against defenders engaging or seeking to engage with the UN and its human rights mechanisms.
We push the UN system to establish clearer protocols on how to consistently and effectively prevent, respond and follow up on cases of reprisals.
We encourage governments, activists, and concerned individuals to stand in solidarity with human rights defenders and organisations who are subjected to reprisals and intimidations.
You can join our campaign by:
Signing our petition to the Secretary-General and his office so they include all four cases in the 2025 report on reprisals.
Human rights defenders are essential agents of change. They promote dignity, fairness, peace and justice in their homes, workplaces, communities and countries. They challenge governments that fail to respect and protect their people, corporations that degrade and destroy the environment, and institutions that perpetuate privilege and patriarchy.
For many the United Nations (UN) is the last arena in which they can confront abuses. And yet, here too they are silenced and harassed by governments. Some States intimidate human rights defenders and victims who try to engage with UN human rights bodies and mechanisms to report violations, or carry out reprisals against those who manage to engage. Those governments see these defenders as enemies and their engagement with the UN as a threat to their image and power.
Over the past years, the reported number and severity of intimidation and reprisals cases has increased.
Acts of intimidation and reprisals aim at creating fear or blocking access to the United Nations of people who defend human rights. Reprisals and intimidation take different forms, from travel bans, threats and harassment, including by officials, smear campaigns, surveillance, introduction of restrictive legislation, to physical attacks, arbitrary arrest and detention, torture and ill-treatment, including sexual violence, denial of access to medical attention and even killings.
The right to safe and unhindered access to international and regional justice mechanisms, and to be free from any form of intimidation or reprisal for seeking justice, is both a fundamental human right and essential to the relevance and effectiveness of these mechanisms.
The participation of human rights defenders in the work of international and regional mechanisms makes for better outcomes. Defenders bring crucial information and perspectives regarding human rights situations on the ground and international and regional mechanisms depend on that knowledge and input to make informed decisions.
The UN has developed a number of mechanisms to deal with intimidation and reprisals over the last 30 years. The main mechanism is currently a report published annually by the UN Secretary-General that collects and publishes incidents of intimidation and reprisals documented by the different UN human rights mechanisms or otherwise submitted by victims.
In addition, since 2016, the Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights has been designated as the senior official to lead the efforts within the UN system to address intimidation and reprisals. You can find more information on the page of the United Nations.
While this appointment led to an increase in resources and better reporting and follow up, there is still room to strengthen the UN’s response. For instance:
ISHR seeks to ensure that international and regional human rights systems have the mechanisms to prevent reprisals and ensure accountability where they occur. ISHR provides protective publicity to human rights defenders at risk and works to bring cases of alleged intimidation and reprisals to the attention of relevant officials in an effort to press for effective preventative measures and responses.
Every year we submit a list of cases of reprisals and intimidation to the UN Secretary-General for him to include in his annual report.
In 2022, ISHR launched the #EndReprisals database which offers a platform where all cases included in the Secretary-General’s reports since 2010 are readily accessible, with detailed information on each case, including the activities of the affected groups or individual defenders, the kind of reprisals they suffered and how these were triggered. With this database, users can more easily navigate the information contained in the Secretary-General’s reports, and research, analyse, and take action on the cases or situations.
ISHR has also published a Handbook on Reprisals to help human rights defenders who engage with the UN to navigate the system and its procedures in case of reprisals or intimidation.
In order to assist stakeholders with research, analysis and action on cases of reprisals and intimidation, ISHR launched an online database compiling cases or situations of intimidation and reprisals documented by the United Nations (UN) Secretary-General between 2010 and 2024.
Cases of intimidation and reprisals against human rights defenders engaging with the UN reported by the UN Secretary General between 2010 and 2024.
Countries were cases of reprisals were documented by the UN Secretary-General between 2010 and 2024.
Reports published by the UN Secretary General on intimidation and reprisals.
In response to the annual call for inputs from the UN Secretary-General, ISHR has submitted 114 cases of intimidation and reprisals against human rights defenders engaging with the UN from 28 countries.
ISHR is pleased to launch its updated Reprisals Handbook in six languages, an essential resource for all stakeholders concerned about intimidation and reprisals against those cooperating with international or regional human rights systems.
An essential tool for human rights defenders and all stakeholders concerned about intimidation and reprisals against those cooperating with international or regional human rights systems.
