Through the years, human rights defenders played a crucial role in the struggle for human rights. Aside from advocates of human rights, they are the ones who are actually doing the spade work, the ones in the battlefield, so to speak. In all cases of human rights violations, whether a case of extrajudicial killing, an enforced disappearance, or any other form of such violations, it is always the human rights defenders who respond, and almost always are the first ones on the scene.

They document, they interview, and they assist the victims and/or their families. Their line of work made them targets of human rights violations. They are either killed, disappeared, arrested based on trumped-up charges, and/or suffer other forms of intimidation and harassments.

This publication, “SURVIVING THE FRONTLINES: Resisting Attacks Against Human Rights Defenders”, published by the National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers (NUPL), with the support of the European Union (E.U.), through its European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights (EIDHR), is a fitting tribute to human rights defenders who put their life on the line, and an opportunity to draw attention to their plight. It is a compilation of selected stories of human rights defenders who have fallen victims to human rights violations.

Through this publication, the NUPL tells their story, their struggle, their travails, their bravery and the fate they have fallen into. The publication highlights the fact that these human rights defenders are ordinary citizens who decided to sacrifice their comfortable life or even their own personal struggles to provide assistance to victims of human rights violations, and in the process became victims themselves.