Sami Huraini
The annual Front Line Defenders Award for Human Rights Defenders at Risk was established in 2005 to honour the work of HRDs who are courageously making outstanding contributions to the promotion and protection of the human rights of others, often at great personal risk to themselves.
Sami Huraini is a Palestinian human rights defender and a board member of the Popular Struggle Coordination Committee (PSCC), a committee that opposes the extension of the illegal Israeli settlement through peaceful demonstrations. Sami Huraini is also a member of the grassroots initiative 'Youth of Sumud', an initiative that was established to peacefully resist the Israeli occupation and the illegal Israeli settlements in Southern Hebron. Sami Huraini has also been involved in protecting the Palestinian civilians from settlers attacks, by escorting Palestinian children to schools and accompanying Palestinian farmers to their lands close to the green line.
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.
