Mr. Andrew Anderson:

I thank the Chairman and the members for the opportunity to engage with the committee today. As the Chairman stated, it is a real pleasure to be at an in-person meeting after so long. We have submitted to the committee a briefing document. I will not read all of it because I do not think that would be helpful. However, I will begin by reading some words from one of the human rights defenders we work with, Claudelice Santos, who is an environmental defender in Brazil. She said:

They cut down one, two trees, but a thousand, five thousand other trees will appear. This is how we will be able to make the world a place with hope, with people seeing the future with hopeful eyes and not afraid to lose their life for the chainsaw of greed and malice of those who do not agree with the idea that the environment is life and that those who defend it also deserve to live.

As members know, we live in a time with human rights challenges and very difficult contexts around the world.

One of the ways we can make a difference is by supporting those people working at the local level who are making a practical difference to advance and defend human rights. Unfortunately, those people, those human rights defenders, HRDs, who work peacefully for the rights of others and to defend the most vulnerable, are also those who are the most targeted in many countries.

This year, we have awarded 641 emergency protection grants already, and that is almost the same number as we managed in the whole of last year, so the level of practical support we are providing to human rights defenders at risk continues to rise. That €1.8 million has been delivered to defenders in 89 countries and 108 of those grants have recently been awarded to defenders in Afghanistan, which is clearly one of the biggest crises we are facing. We have also been giving big levels of support to human rights defenders in Nicaragua, Belarus, Turkey and Colombia.

I take the opportunity to publicly thank the Irish Government for its ongoing support, both in terms of the political priority it has given to the protection of human rights defenders at the UN, in other international fora and in the EU, and also bilaterally with a number of governments. There is also the key support we have had from Irish Aid, which has been a supporter of Front Line Defenders since our beginnings almost exactly 20 years ago, in 2001.

We want to raise three key issues with the committee this morning. There is a growing trend, unfortunately, of killings of human rights defenders around the world. My colleague, Michelle Foley, who runs our memorial project, will speak about that. We will talk about imprisoned defenders and we will speak briefly about Afghanistan, before passing over to Hassan Ali Faiz. I will pass over to Ms Foley to talk about the horrific trend in terms of the killing of human rights defenders.