Table of Contents - East and Horn of Africa Human Rights ...

Regional Workshop on Women and Minority Human Rights Defenders
actors. The workshop highlighted how states parties fail to fully comply with their obligations
and as a result, human rights defenders are suffering. The workshop showed that there is still a
great deal of work to be done to improve the situation of HRDs. It was also apparent that there
is immense potential to expand and replicate events such as this workshop in other parts of the
region, not only to raise awareness of issues affecting human rights defenders but also to build
their capacity on aspects such as gender mainstreaming, campaigning, lobbying and advocacy
processes within their organizations.
In the plenary sessions, participants gave much emphasis on the active role of the UN Special
Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders who in this case is a Ugandan woman. Participants
hailed the EHAHRDP for organizing the conference and they together declared their
commitment in supporting each other and other defenders from across the region.
B. Background
The East and Horn of Africa
Human Rights Defenders Project,
a is the Secretariat of 65
Organizations in 10 countries in
the East and Horn of African
region works to maximize the
protection of Human Rights
Defenders (HRDs) in the region
and to enhance the awareness of
human rights work. EHAHRDP
organized a workshop on women
and minority rights defenders
Some of the participants from Somalia
intended to bring together
network members, women human rights defenders and minority rights defenders to
specifically discuss and identify challenges facing WHRDs and MRDs and create strategies to
address them.
However, WHRDs face peculiar problems associated with their gender and the rights they
defend and there is a general knowledge gap and reluctant attitude among key stakeholders to
address gender specific challenges. The abuses against WHRDs are generally
not classified as human rights violations. One serious consequence of this is that the atrocities
against them are given lower priority. Sometimes they are not considered ‘serious enough’ to
merit response or redress, or they are simply ignored in favour of those committed against
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