Nymia Pimentel-Simbulan
Nymia Pimentel-Simbulan is the Executive Director of PhilRights, a human rights institute which is part of the Philippine Alliance of Human Rights Advocates (PAHRA). PhilRights is actively involved in human rights education-training, research, information, and monitoring and documentation of human rights violations, in particular economic, social and cultural rights. PhilRights has played an important role in the abolition of the death penalty in the country in 2006. It has also played a leading role in the submission of alternative reports on economic, social and cultural rights to the UN. The institute has published several human rights training manuals, books, and primers which have been used extensively by NGOs and peoples' organizations.
HRDs face extra-judicial killings, enforced disappearances, fabricated charges, arrest, denial of bail, threats and intimidation, and restrictions on their rights of freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and association. Heavy militarisation in some areas, Mindanao in particular, significantly affects the work of HRDs.
