Over three days, 40 human rights defenders from the Americas, Europe, Africa and Asia came together in Brussels to exchange experiences and knowledge about holistic protection. This meeting allowed us to analyze the global tendencies that impact our risk as well as identify our common needs as a collective of human rights defenders. The sessions allowed us to construct a common narrative and key messages and recommendations to political actors in the European Union and its member states.

While the number of homocides has dropped in Honduras, the number of human rights defenders killed, according to UN Special Rapporteur Michel Forst, has increased dramatically over the past few years. In the months before the November 2017 presidential election, the UN Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights (OHCHR) in Honduras documented violence, intimidation and threats targeting human rights defenders.

During the week of June 18, 2018, PBI-USA hosted an advocacy speaking tour with leading human rights defenders from Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico. In Central America and Mexico, indigenous and environmental rights defenders are extremely vulnerable. At best, governments in the region fail to adequately protect defenders. At worst, government forces are complicit in the attacks against them.

March 13, 2018

March 8, 2018

PBI celebrates the incredible and vital work done by Women Human Rights Defenders (WHRDs) in Honduras, Mexico and Kenya, despite their continuing struggle against oppression and human rights abuses.

March 2, 2018

More than 60 international organizations, backed by members of European Parliament, demand justice in the case of Berta Cáceres, echoing the requests of COPINH (Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras) for guarantees of non-repetion and defense of human rights in the reigion.

Martín Gómez is a small, slim man. He walks with confidence and you can see that he has planted corn and grain all his life. He lives in the middle of green mountains in Santa Elena, southern Honduras. Martín is part of the MILPAH indigenous movement, created in 2010 to defend land and the Lenca indigenous community, a predominant indigenous people in Honduras. A year after the organization was founded, the Honduran government approved a concession for the construction of the Los Encinos S.A. hydroelectric dam in Santa Elena on the Chinacla river.

January 22, 2018

Aurelia Arzú is a human rights defender from the Garifuna community in Honduras and vice coordinator of the Fraternal Black Organization of Honduras (OFRANEH). OFRANEH work to safeguard the economic, social, and cultural rights of the unique Garifuna ethnic community.