HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH

Every year Human Rights Watch honors human rights monitors from around the world for their commitment to the defense of human rights. In challenging the worlds powerful human rights abusers, they are often at grave risk. We work closely with them to conduct investigations and devise strategies to end abuses. For 1997, the people we honored were:

ALBANIA

Fatos Lubonja

Fatos T. Lubonja was born in Tirana in 1951. He graduated from Tirana University in theoretical physics in 1974 and was arrested in the same year and sentenced to seven years imprisonment for "agitation and propaganda against the state" because of his political writings. In 1979, while serving his first sentence, he was charged again and sentenced to another ten years in prison and labor camps. He was released in 1991 with most of Albania's political prisoners and co-founded Albania's first ever human rights group (Forum for the Defense of Human Rights, which later became the Albanian Helsinki Committee).

Since then, he has been one of Albania's most outspoken human rights activist, Unlike most former political prisoners, and many of Albania's intellectuals, Lubonja openly criticized the authoritarian government of Sali berisha. Since 1994 he has been both editor and publisher of Pepjekja ("Endeavor"), Albania's leading critical social/political journal. He is the author of three books, including a novel he wrote while in prison. In 1997 Fatos served as spokesman of the Forum for Democracy, a coalition of organizations and political parties united in opposition to the government of Sali Berisha.

CAMBODIA

Dr. Lao Mong Hay

Dr. Lao Mong Hay is the Executive Director of the Khmer Institute for Democracy, one of the first non-governmental organizations created to stimulate debate on democracy and human rights in Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge era. Founded in November 1991 shortly after the Paris Accords, the Institute has taken on such diverse and high-profile projects as producing a weekly television round-table on controversial public issues of the day, training provincial police leaders and the diplomatic corps in human rights and international law, and conducting grassroots education in electoral democracy.

Dr. Lao and the Institute have come under government pressure, particularly with regard to their educational television programming, a novelty in a country with little tradition of independent journalism and where the broadcast media have been dominated by political factions. In October the Information Ministry cancelled Dr. Lao's panal discussion show on state-run TVK. The move came in retaliation for Lao Mong Hay's criticism of Cambodia's record on democracy following the July 5-6 coup. Many outspoken democracy activists and politicians left the country after the coup, but Dr. Lao Mong Hay decided to remain, in Phnom Penh and outspoken.

Prior to assuming the leadership of the Institute, Dr. Lao was director of the Cambodian Mine Action Center, a unique government-supported agency dedicated to mine clearance and mine education that grew out of the United Nations peace-keeping mission. In that capacity, Dr. Lao urged the Cambodian government to take a leading role in the campaign to immediately ban the production, stockpiling and use of landmines worldwide, a cause recently awarded the Nobel Prize. Human Rights Watch is honored to have him as a member of the advisory board of the Arms Project since 1996.

CHINA

Wei Jingsheng

Except for a six-month period between September 1993 and March 1994, Wei Jingsheng, China's most prominent dissident, has spent most of his adult life in prison. Now forty-eight, he was first jailed in 1979 for his participation in the Democracy Wall movement. His famous essay, "The Fifth Modernization," argued that in addition to four kinds of modernization advocated by Deng Xiaoping, China also needed democracy. That essay was followed by another calling Deng an autocrat. For these words, Wei Jingsheng was sentenced on October 16, 1979 to fifteen years in prison.

His recently-published collection of prison letters, The Courage to Stand Alone, makes it clear that his treatment in prison was always harsh. He spent long periods in solitary confinement, and his health deteriorated sharply. In late 1993, he was released in what was widely interpreted as an attempt by China to deflect human rights criticism in pursuit of its ultimately unsuccessful bid to host the 2000 Olympic Games. Wei immediately went back to advocating political reform, meeting with activists, journalists, and others, and writing for foreign and domestic publications.

On April 1, 1994, he was again taken into custody, and after a delay of eighteen months was convicted of "counterrevolution." In November, the Chinese government released Wei on medical parole.

LEBANON

Dr. Muhamad Mugraby

Dr. Muhamad Mugraby, a Lebanese attorney with a busy corporate and commercial law practice in Beirut, is also a well-known defender of human rights in his country. He has long championed the independence of the judiciary, not only in Lebanon but regionwide. In 1967, he introduced civil rights and civil liberties as courses at the Lebanese University School of Law, where he taught for many years. He is also an outspoken critic of Syria's increasingly tight grip on Lebanon, and believes that human rights in Lebanon cannot be restored without addressing the harmful impact of the ubiquitous Syrian role in the country's affairs.

As a human rights lawyer and activist, Dr. Mugraby has focused on some of the most serious human rights problems in Lebanon, such as incommunicado detention, torture, and the expanding use of military courts to try civilians. He is not afraid to take on politically sensitive cases. He has represented property owners and tenants in the old city of Beirut who have challenged unlawful practices of Prime Minister Hariri's Solidere-- the multi-billion-dollar real estate company -- carrying out the controversial physical reorganization of downtown Beirut. In March 1997, he made formal written complaints to Lebanon's public prosecutor about the unlawful detention of two Lebanese who "disappeared" in January and in March, were transferred into Syrian custody, and held incommunicado in Damascus. Both demarches called on Lebanese authorities to investigate these cases, and prosecute the perpetrators and their accomplices.

Dr. Mugraby holds degrees from the Lebanese University School of Law, and Columbia University Law School, where he was an International Law Fellow from 1963-65 and where he earned two masters degrees and a doctorate. He is a member of the International Bar Asociation and the International Association of Lawyers.

COLOMBIA

Carlos Rodriguez

Carlos Rodriguez is a distinguished lawyer, teacher, and writer who has dedicated his talents to the defense of human rights in Colombia. Educated at the prestigious Javeriana University in Bogota and the Complutense University of Madrid, he began his professional career in 1974. He is a founding member of one of Colombia's most effective human rights groups, the Colombian Commission of Jurists. There, he has pioneered the international dimension of human rights work in Colombia, heading up the team that finally made Colombia a priority at the regular meetings of the Human Rights Commission in Geneva and at the offices of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Largely through his efforts, the high commissioner set up for the first time an office in Bogota to pressure the Colombian government to protect human rights.

Rodriguez has also played a key role in landmark cases in the defense of human rights in Colombia. As a member of the group looking into the 1990 Trujillo massacre, he helped persuade the government to accept responsibility for the killings of 109 people by an army major and his paramilitary allies. Rodriguez continues to work on other important cases, including the Villatina massacre, the Caloto massacre, and the Los Uvos massacre, all of which involved the direct participation of state agents with paramilitary groups.

DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO

Dieudonne Been Masudi Kingombe

As Director of the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law (CDH) in Lubumbashi, the second largest city in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Dieudonne Been Masudi Kingombe oversees and coordinates the work of a team of three full time investigators, and half a dozen volunteers. During the infamous Mobutu era, the CDH, which was founded by a group of lawyers in 1992, assumed a pivotal role in exposing abuses, in pressing for accountability, and in mediating between victims and the authorities. The Center's reports also exposed the corruption and ineptitude of the judiciary, and denounced national and regional politicians for relying on ethnic manipulation to consolidate their hold on power.

With the advent of the government of the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo, the Center, as before, spearheaded the local human rights community's efforts to denounce the far-too-familiar abuses perpetrated by the agents of the new government. On July 31, 1997 Center staff visited detainees held at the headquarters of the new political police. In a scathing, two page open letter to the minister of interior after that visit, CDH denounced the arbitrary detention of 89 individuals, and the torture and beatings some of them had suffered. In the days that followed, most of them, including high-profile political detainees, were released.

Been Masudi is also the inspiration behind the "Concertation," the umbrella forum of all human rights organizations in Lubumbashi that act together to raise human rights cases with government and military officials.

RUSSIA

Marina Pisklakova

Marina Pisklakova founded the Moscow Crisis Center for Women in July 1993, to focus on domestic violence and set up one of the first domestic violence hotlines in Russia. It takes up to 250 calls a month. Marina has emerged as a leader in the fight against violence against women in Russia. She has also done work on sexual violence more generally and on trafficking of Russian women into domestic work and prostitution throughout Europe. She was also one of the cofounders of the Russian Association of Crisis Centers for Women.

Marina is currently involved in two major efforts: To open the first shelter for battered women in Russia, and to develop pilot programs to coordinate the law enforcement, medical and nongovernmental response to violence against women.

UGANDA

Angelina Acheng Atyam

Angelina Acheng Atyam, a nurse-midwife and mother of six, is the vice chair of the Concerned Parents Association, a group of Ugandan parents who came together to demand action when their daughters, 139 girls from the St. Mary's School, were abducted by the Lord's Resistance Army in October 1996. For years in the northern part of Uganda the Lord's Resistance Army has been stealing children for use in their rebel army in their attempt to overthrow the Ugandan government. Children as young as eight-years old have been kidnapped, tortured, raped, virtually enslaved, and sometimes killed by the rebel army. Angelina's daughter was fourteen when she was abducted, and remains in rebel captivity today.

The Concerned Parents have worked tirelessly to secure the release of their daughters, and all children in rebel captivity, encouraging other families to speak out about the abductions of their children. Families have been reluctant to come forward for fear of reprisals. Angelina and the Concerned Parents have made it clear, by their own example, that families do not have to watch silently as their children are stolen from them. They have shown that they do not have to tolerate the intolerable. The Concerned Parents have succeeded in bringing national and international attention to their cause, and have raised their concerns with Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and at high-level meetings between representatives of the governments of Uganda and Sudan. Although they were drawn into the turmoil surrounding the conflict in the north only when their own children were stolen from them, the Concerned Parents have become a powerful voice for all children in rebel captivity.