Wissam Tarif - The Foundation For The Defense of Prisoners of Conscience (FDPOC) and INSAN

The Foundation For The Defense of Prisoners of Conscience (FDPOC) and INSAN

FDPOC (now superseded by the Europe-based NGO INSAN INSAN)worked in Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia in particular. It received daily monitoring reports from grass roots activists within its countries of focus, in order to ensure that the rest of the world heard about the violations of human rights the authorities preferred to keep silent.

The organisation and its Board of Trustees were also active at an international level.

Wissam Tarif, however, argued for a wider, more global vision for the Organisation, as a result of which FDPOC took a strategic decision in 2009: to maintain its activists and workers in situ in the Middle East but to shift its centre of operations to the European Union in order to not only increase its operational effectiveness, but to ensure a framework of freedom which would better enable it to ensure human rights in the region were better and more immediately projected. The new organisation,under the name of 'INSAN' (www.insanintl.com) is a fully registered NGO with its headquarters in Spain. INSAN thus builds on the previous work done by FDPOC but,at the same time, expands upon it. INSAN's work, while focussing on human rights, also covers the broader fields of democracy and development issues across not only the Middle East but also throughout North Africa (MENA). It was in this wider context (and to facilitate its activist and campaigning work), that the Organisation's offices were transferred to Spain, which is strategically situated to service the logistic and campaigning needs of this already growing but well-established Organisation. This is especially the case with an eye to INSAN's centre of operations in the MENA region and to the closeness of influential EU institutions and politicians in Brussels.

Wissam Tarif is currently Executive Director of INSAN.