Imad Abu Shamsiyya
As Palestinians, we never feel safe. We have lived all of our lives in a country where we are made to feel that we are always in the wrong place at the wrong time
Imad Abu Shamsiyya is a co-founder of the Human Rights Defenders Palestine, and works specifically on documentation and video recording of human rights violations committed against Palestinians. He is a long-standing activist in Palestine and was formerly a volunteer at B'Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, where he was involved in documenting the occupation of Tel-Rumeida.
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. In some instances Israeli settlers have also been the perpetrators of violence against human rights defenders.
