Defenders and States exchange experiences on protection mechanisms

The meeting gathered human rights defenders, a representative of the Inter American Commission on Human Rights and representatives of the protection mechanisms of Colombia, Mexico, Honduras, Mongolia, the Philippines, Burkina Faso and Côte d’Ivoire. 

During the first day, we created  separate spaces for discussion – one for human rights defenders and the other one for representatives of the protection mechanism. In the first space, human rights defenders exposed the situation and risks they face in their national and regional contexts, as well as their needs and expectations of protection mechanisms. In the second space, representatives of the protection mechanisms exposed the different structures and particularities of their mechanisms. 

On the second day, defenders and protection mechanism representatives came together to exchange on the challenges they face to protect the right to defend rights and those who exercise it. Many issues were raised, such as the lack of funding, lack of trust and participation from civil society, government and personnel changes, difficulties in protecting communities and collectives and genuinely addressing the root causes of risks, the challenges associated with preventing attacks, the lack of capacity to ensure other governmental bodies comply with orders, ongoing impunity, challenges addressing and ensuring accountability for certain perpetrators of violence such as non-State armed groups or businesses. The participants also shared experiences and discussed good practices they have put in place to overcome these challenges. Some specific cases were shared as strategies and successful experiences. Civil society representatives also shared experiences about successful non-State protection measures they have adopted within their movements and communities to complement or replace State protection. Participants agreed on the need to change the understanding of protection and to shift the paradigm towards a model of protection that is less focused on physical and individual measures and more based on prevention and addressing the structural causes that allow attacks against defenders. 

On the third day of the meeting, the participants considered strategies to improve the functioning and effectiveness of protection mechanisms, the legal protection of human rights defenders as well as how the mechanisms could better collaborate with defenders. They ended the meeting discussing possibilities for enhanced regional and cross regional collaboration and committed to bringing the learnings and discussions back to their countries and organisations. 

During the meeting, ISHR also shared the recently launched Declaration+25, a civil-society led document endorsed by lawyers and experts and grounded on international law. It supplements the 1998 UN Declaration on human rights defenders and is meant to be read alongside it. Together, they set the standards to take into account when protecting human rights defenders and the right to defend rights. Participants considered the Declaration +25 a useful tool in strengthening the protection of human rights defenders going forward, and a crucial resource and collation of existing standards on the right to defend human rights.