Download photo booklet featuring the Award Recipients
2024 Front Line Defenders Award Recipients:
AFRICA
Gamito dos Santos Carlos, a human rights defender from Nampula, northern Mozambique, is the executive director of AJOPAZ, the Youth Association for Peace. His human rights work centres around social, civil and political rights and accountability. Gamito has been advocating for the protection of human rights activists and engaging with young people to advocate for significant social change in his community, to foster justice and sustainable decision-making by authorities. He is also a member of the Friends of Amurane Association for a Better Mozambique -KÓXUKHURO, as well as an analyst and Provincial Coordinatorof the Mozambican Network of Human Rights Defenders (RMDDH). He has faced ongoing intimidation for his human rights work, including repeated raids on his home and the loss of his job, and in March 2023 he was kidnapped and tortured after he organised a demonstration.
AMERICAS
Muñecas de Arcoíris (Rainbow Dolls) is a collective of trans women from the city of Tegucigalpa and Comayagüela in Honduras, founded in 2008. Muñecas works under the LGTBI+ Arcoíris Association of Honduras with the aim of creating a safe space for trans sex worker women. The members of Muñecas started as volunteers of the Arcoíris Association, where they became more aware of the situation that trans people were facing in Honduras. With the support of the Arcoíris Association, Muñecas members received training related to their rights as LGTBI+ people. They then started to document human rights violations specifically against trans women in 2006 and two years later, on 31 October 2008, the collective was formally created as a trans women organisation. Most of its members are sex workers, informal workers, stylists, and housekeepers,among others.
ASIA AND THE PACIFIC
Sammi Deen Baloch is a Baloch woman human rights defender from Mashkai, Awaran District of Balochistan province,Pakistan. She is the General Secretary of the Voice for Baloch Missing Persons (VBMP), a non-governmental organisation that represents and supports victims and relatives of enforced disappearances in Balochistan. In June 2009, at the age of 10, Sammi’s father, Dr Deen Mohammed Baloch, was forcibly disappeared in Khuzdar, Balochistan. She began persistently campaigning for the release of her father, which further led to her deeper, collective involvement in advocating against enforced disappearances in Balochistan by state forces.
EUROPE AND CENTRAL ASIA
Doros Polykarpou is a leading human rights defender and founding member of KISA (the Movement for Equality, Support, and Anti-Racism). He is an expert on migration, asylum, discrimination, racism, and trafficking in Cyprus. For over 27 years, he has dedicated himself to defending and advocating for the rights of people on the move and tackling discrimination and xenophobia in Cyprus, navigating the unique socio-political environment of the small island nation with strong conservative elements. This has exposed him and the organisation to a backlash, and earlier this year KISA’s office was targeted by a bomb attack.
MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA
We Are Not Numbers (WANN) is a youth-led Palestinian nonprofit project established in the Gaza Strip in 2014, with the aim of telling the everyday, human stories of thousands of Palestinians. Their vision is to spread Palestinian voices and narratives, based on respect for human rights through the work of peaceful, non-violent, youth led Palestinians. When co-founder Ahmed Alnaouq lost his 23-year-old brother, Ayman, during an Israeli military attack on Palestinians in the summer of 2014, he was devastated, and sunk into a depression from which he thought he would never escape. During this time, he met American journalist Pam Bailey, who encouraged him to celebrate his brother’s legacy by writing a story about him. Like many young people in Gaza, Ahmed was majoring in English literature to improve his language skills. Pam published the story on a Western news website, which was well-received beyond expectation. Ahmed and Pam realised that writing the story had brought some healing to him and that this could be done on a much bigger platform.
