Sudanese women’s activist and engineer Amira Osman Hamed has won a Front Line Defenders Award for Human Rights Defenders at Risk.
She has been advocating for Sudanese women for two decades.
She was charged for wearing trousers in 2002, yet was never discouraged about her mission. She drew international support in 2013 when she was detained and threatened with flogging for refusing to wear a headscarf.
In 2009 she established “No to Women Oppression”, an initiative to advocate against the much-derided Public Order Law but was overruled in 2019 after President Omar al-Bashir’s banishment following a mass riot.
In late January 2022, her team spoke to AFP that “30 masked armed men” had stormed into her house in Khartoum in the middle of the night, “taking her to an unknown location.” In quick response, the United Nations mission to Sudan called for her release in a tweet.
She was later released in early February
on crutches due to the injury sustained.
Amira “continued to actively participate in peaceful demonstrations”, said in a statement by the NGO Front Line Defenders, which awarded the activist.
Other defenders from Afghanistan, Belarus, Zimbabwe, and Mexico also received the 2022 award.
The award has honored human rights defenders annually since 2005.
