Sudanese women’s activist Amira Osman Hamed has won a Front Line Defenders Award for Human Rights Defenders at Risk, the organisation announced Friday. The activist has been advocating for Sudanese women for two decades.
The activist and engineer has been advocating for Sudanese women for two decades, and was detained this year in a crackdown following the country’s latest coup.
She was among defenders from Afghanistan, Belarus, Zimbabwe and Mexico who also received the 2022 award for Human Rights Defenders at Risk.
The Annual Front Line Defenders Award for Human Rights Defenders at Risk was established in 2005 to honor the work of human rights defenders (HRDs) who are courageously making outstanding contributions to the promotion and protection of the human rights of others, often at great personal risk to themselves.
The Award focuses international attention on the work and struggles of HRDs, providing a greater national and international platform to speak about and advocate for the human rights issues they are defending.
In the motivation for the award for Amira Osman Hamed you can read: “Ameira Osman Hamid is a woman human rights defender in Sudan, an engineer, and the Chairperson of the ‘’No to Women Oppression’’ Initiative. Ameira has consistently advocated for democracy, human rights, and women’s rights.
Since its establishment in 2009, the NWO Initiative launched campaigns against the Public Order Law, which would dictate what was proper for women to wear and how to act in public life while also allotting power to citizens to report such behaviors.”
“The NWO Initiative was founded after Sudanese journalist Lubna Ahmed Al-Hussein and 13 other women were arrested and faced flogging for wearing trousers in public (a violation against the Public Order Law). In November 2019, the law was finally repealed. The Initiative also works with other NGOs and civil society organizations for the advocacy and advancement of women’s rights.”
“Ameira herself was previously a victim of human rights violations – in 2013, she was detained after she refused to put on her headscarf. Ameira and the NWO have launched numerous campaigns against the Public Order Law. For her work, Ameira has been a victim of unjust arrests and detention. In 2002, she was charged for wearing trousers, and in January 2022 she was taken from her house in Khartoum to an unknown location by armed security officers before being released on bail a week later. Nevertheless, Ameira never deterred from her mission and actively participated in peaceful demonstrations.”
Front Line Defenders is an international human rights organisation founded in 2001 in Dublin, Ireland, with the specific aim of protecting human rights defenders by addressing their protection needs through grants, networking, capacity building and access to the protection mechanisms of the UN, the European Union and its member states.
