Human Rights Defenders

Terra de Direitos works against violence and criminalization of human rights defenders, recognizing and strengthening their actions as subjects of social transformation and enforcement of rights. By building collective civil society spaces, such as the Brazilian Human Rights Defenders Committee, we seek to achieve the monitoring and demandability of rights, as well as the building of public policies for a group increasingly exposed to violence and vulnerability in our country.

An alarming number of human rights defenders are murdered, threatened and criminalized every year in Brazil. Plagued by a selective model of justice and a model of development that puts profit before life, human rights defenders play a key role in strengthening democracy, building human rights and withstanding serious violations.

Human rights defenders are individuals, groups, organizations, peoples and/or social movements working against all violations of rights and fundamental freedoms, as well as working to win new individual and collective rights (political, social, economic, cultural and environmental rights). The efforts of human rights defenders result in the affirmation of rights even when these have not yet taken on a juridical form or a specific conceptual definition. Their actions are also political resistance to the ways in which capital is organized, political resistance to strategies intended to delegitimize and criminalize social movements and political resistance to the absence of social recognition of their demands.

Terra de Direitos works towards human rights defenders being able to overcome the causes that generate threats to the continuity of their struggles.