Violence Against Human Rights Defenders
Many human rights defenders who have arisen to oppose human rights violations and their families and friends suffer violence and persecution across Brazil. Telephone death threats are prominent and often followed through by ambush or assassination.
Government officials, attorneys, union leaders and even religious leaders have often been targeted, as with Antonio Fernandez Saenz affair. The danger of human rights defense entered the world press with the murder of Dorothy Stang in 2005, and Chico Mendes in 1988.
Read more about this topic: Human Rights In Brazil
Famous quotes containing the words violence, human, rights and/or defenders:
“Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power’s disappearance.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“Uncertainty about the outcome is a given in child rearing and not a reflection of a mother’s inadequacy. She should not be misled by her wish to be omnipotent, all-powerful, all-giving, the perfect mother, who will right all the wrongs and make up for all the deprivations of her own childhood. She is simply an imperfect human being with needs of her own.”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)
“The aim of every political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression.”
—French National Assembly. Declaration of the Rights of Man (drafted and discussed August 1789, published September 1791)
“The nation which forgets its defenders will be itself forgotten.”
—Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)