Hannan Ashrawi
Hannan Ashrawi is the Founder and Secretary General of the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy. She is a former faculty member of Birzeit University on the West Bank, and a former Minister of Higher Education and Research for the Palestinian Authority.
Human rights defenders in the OPT are subjected to acts of harassment, restrictions on freedom of movement, stigmatisation, abductions, long periods of arbitrary detention usually under administrative detention orders, illegal searches of their homes and offices and killings. Many of the violations are state-sanctioned, or if not sanctioned at the highest levels of the Israeli political and military establishment, then condoned by the ongoing policy of impunity which permeates the military and judicial system in relation to the OPT.
