Sudanese activist honored with human rights award


A Sudanese women’s rights activist, Amira Osmane Hamed, received the prize for human rights defenders at risk from the international NGO Front Line Defenders on Friday May 27.

An engineer in her forties, Amira Osmane Hamed, who has been campaigning for the cause of women in Sudan for many years, was first arrested in 2002 for wearing pants, then in 2013 for refusing to cover the hair. At the time, a law prohibited women in Sudan from uncovering their hair or wearing trousers in public. This law, whichturns Sudanese women from victims to criminals“, according to Amira Osmane Hamed, was finally repealed in 2019, after the dismissal by the army of President Omar al-Bashir, who ruled Sudan with an iron fist.

Severe repression

More recently, Amira Osmane Hamed was arrested last January before being released a week later for denouncing military power after General Abdel Fattah al-Burhane’s putsch in October 2021. Some of her relatives had told the AFP at the end of January that “30 armed and masked menbroke into his house in Khartoum in the middle of the night, “and took him to an unknown destination“.

Since General Burhane’s coup, thousands of Sudanese have regularly demonstrated to demand civilian power, but the crackdown in this large East African country has already left 96 dead, hundreds injured and as many arrests. , with no political outcome in sight.

Amira Osmane Hamednever shied away from her mission and continued to actively participate in peaceful protests“said in a press release the NGO Front Line Defenders, which rewarded the activist. The Prize for Human Rights Defenders at Risk has been awarded since 2005 by the Dublin-based NGO. This year, in addition to Amira Osmane Hamed, activists from Afghanistan, Belarus, Zimbabwe and Mexico were also awarded.



Source link -94