2007 Shortlist - Bindmans Law and Campaigning Award
Siphiwe Hlophe, Swaziland (Award recipient)
Nominated by David Blunkett
In 1999, as a married 40-year-old looking to continue her education in agricultural economics, Siphiwe Hlophe discovered she was HIV positive. As a result, her husband left her and she lost an academic scholarship, but she reacted by co-founding an organization in 2001 called Swazis for Positive Living (Swapol), which aims to fight gender discrimination related to HIV/Aids and help other HIV/Aids victims. Almost half of Swaziland’s population is infected with HIV, and the situation for women in the country is even dimmer. Women are killed for disclosing their infection or for simply finding out about their husbands infection. Similarly, women who are HIV-positive are isolated from their families and communities.
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Yalemzewd Bekele, Ethiopia
Yalemzewd Bekele is a prominent human rights lawyer and her projects often focus on civil society and relevant human rights issues. She has also volunteered with the Ethiopian Women Lawyers' Association (EWLA) in her campaign for women’s rights in her country, where she been an activist for women for a long time. She worked for the European Commission in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa.
Ethiopian authorities arrested Bekele and a colleague on 19 October while they were trying to cross the border into Kenya. Amnesty International believed her to be at high risk of torture and mistreatment. The authorities released her on 27 October, though she reportedly had begun a hunger strike in protest of her detention while imprisoned.
Apparently she was arrested due to ‘the publication and distribution by the political opposition Coalition for Unity and Democracy (CUD) of a calendar of action for non-violent civil disobedience,’ which was published on 11 September to coincide with the Ethiopian New Year. Others have been arrested with the calendar’s publication in October 2006 and the Coalition for Unity and Democracy experienced considerable friction with the government in 2005, notably related to the publication of the book of one of its leaders, written in prison. Demonstrations in June and November 2005 led to the arrest of several thousand people, members of the CUD and other opposition parties.
Given the human rights issues in Ethiopia, Bekele’s actions make her a strong candidate for Law, especially given the call for civil disobedience as a means of protest. She seems to be doing everything right on her part and a suitable candidate whose voice has risen to be heard around the world, especially after her arrest in mid-2006.
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Abdul-Rahman Al-Lahem, Saudi Arabia
Abdul-Rahman Al-Lahem works as a human rights lawyer in Saudi Arabia, and over the past three years he has sought high-profile cases that highlight the problems he sees in Saudi law, which derives from the Shariah laws of the Quran and often has moralistic overtones. For example, in December 2006 he took the case of two women, a mother and daughter, accused of promiscuity. Both were taken as they left a female relative’s residence and the charge was that they had consorted with men at the relative’s house.
‘If we win this case, it will have more of an impact than a dozen lectures or newspaper articles,’ he said. ‘It will send a powerful message to them, and to the public, who view men of the cloth as untouchable. It will prove that nobody is above the rule of law.’
Other high-profile cases he has taken include one with a 19-year-old girl found in a car with a man. She was then kidnapped and gang-raped by seven men. While some of the rapists were convicted, the rape victim herself was subjected to 90 lashes for being alone with a man. His major cases have also confronted topics such as freedom of expression (especially pertaining to religion) and homosexuality.
His own background in the Shariah makes him well suited to shows its weaknesses in the law court. He has a degree in the Islamic law and in the late 1990s was an Arabic teacher and activist in the conservative Islamic Sahwa group. His exposure to other cultures in the isolated city of Hafr al-Batin and the law school of Riyadh radically changed his way of thinking and sparked his campaign against the human rights violations he sees in the Shariah law, such as the use of lashes, for instance. He is a 35-year-old father of two.
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Stanislav Dmitrievsky And The Russian-Chechen Friendship Society, Russia
‘We have limited room for maneuver,’ said Stanislav Dmitrievsky in an interview on 24 October 2006. ‘But if the prosecutors expect to silence us by closing us down, I should inform them that they'll have to kill every single one of us to achieve that.’
Director of the Russian-Chechen Friendship Society, Stanislav Dmitriyevsky was issued a two-year suspended prison sentence and a four-year probation period on 3 February 2006 for ‘inciting interethnic hatred by using the mass media’. As part of the verdict, Dmitriyevsky must report to authorities regularly, and notify authorities of any travel plans. The verdict leaves him vulnerable to imprisonment for minor infractions, including ones provoked by government agents.
The Society for Russian-Chechen Friendship provided one of the few outlets for independent journalist on the situation of Chechnya since its founding in the year 2000. It was based in the central Russian city Nizhnii Novgorod and fought for human rights by publishing Pravozashchita (Rights Defense), a newspaper filled with commentary and news regarding such issues, and regarded as one of the few remaining sources of independent news about Chechnya.
Stanislav Dmitrievsky served as the organization’s executive director when the Niznhy Novgorod Regional Court shut it down on 12 October 2006 on the grounds that the Russian-Chechen Friendship Society violated federal laws about extremist organizations.
In spite of these setbacks, Dmitrievsky spoke a week after the court ordered its closure about his plans to appeal the decision. He said the organization’s members wanted to focus on establishing a framework for an international tribunal for examining crimes against humanity in Chechnya. In the past, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe said they would pursue this route if the situation in Chechnya did not improve.
On 23 January 2007 the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation upheld its decision to terminate the organisation. Dmitrievsky spoke out again the very next day, calling the trial a ‘farce’ and mentioned over a hundred public figures from over 20 countries still support the RCFS. The RCFS statement declared they would continue to appeal over the violations of Articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention.
The RCFS legal entity has moved to Finland in the meantime, with Dmitrievsky and two others named as board members. They have set up ‘Nizhny Novgorod Foundation for Promoting Tolerance established in Nizhny Novgorod and another regional Tolerance association was registered in Chechnya’ in January 2007 to operate in the organization’s absence. They plan to continue their projects—‘informational, humanitarian and the legal project on the tribunal’—as of late January 2007.
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