To draw attention to the challenging realities of everyday life for human rights defenders, the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom (FNF) has launched The Human Rights Defenders (HRD) publication series. Each year, a specific thematic and geographic focus is placed on HRDs, outlining their lives, stories, missions, achievements, and challenges.

This year, the focus is on lawyers and legal practitioners as human rights defenders. Human rights lawyers are fundamental in effective elimination and remedy of human rights violation via different forms of legal protection, e.g. legal aid, victims’ representation, meaningful access to justice, etc. Nevertheless, they often face enormous challenges in performing their peaceful and pro-democracy conduct, i.e. they are threatened, denied access to the courtrooms, arbitrarily arrested, sent to prison and exile, or even murdered. 

With the pro-democracy approach, the HRDs publication looks at countries and regions where the FNF is directly or indirectly involved via its regional and project offices to inform a larger audience at the regional and international levels about the situation of human rights violations. It further draws attention to the critical issues arising for HRDs as well as their undeniable impact on the promotion of human rights and liberal values via policy-oriented discussions intended at changes on the ground.