Solidarity Message of Ms. Mary Lawlor, UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights for Bugkos 2025

Hello, everyone, and thank you for inviting me to speak at this event to mark World Humanitarian Day.

Around the globe, humanitarian workers and human rights defenders protect the lives, dignity, and rights of others. In the Philippines, this work is too often carried out in shadow of surveillance, harassment, intimidation, criminalization, threats, or worse. As UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders, a substantial part of my work involves urging states to protect the rights of defenders, and ensure that they can carry out their peaceful and legitimate work in a safe and supportive environment.

Since my mandate began on May 2020, I have sent 19 communications to the Philippine government regarding smear campaigns, red-tagging, arbitrary detention, judicial harassment, physical attack, and even killings of human rights defenders. I have seen how the misuse of counterterrorism laws has been used to delegitimize and paralyze human rights defenders, NGOs, and community organizations serving the public good in cities, villages, and isolated areas. I have seen too many attempts by both state and non-state actors to silence those who provide food and medical care to the most marginalized, defend the land and environment, stand up for workers’ rights, empower women and girls, and protect the rights of indigenous communities.

 But I’ve also seen something far stronger than repression—you’re resilient. Your ability to come together, to build solidarity across movements and communities, and an event like this one is a powerful reminder that no law, no smear campaign, no active intimidation can erase the legitimacy of your work.

Human rights defenders like you breathe life into the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. You are its torch bearers, and the living proof that fair and equal societies are built, not through fear and silencing, but through participation, justice, and solidarity. You are ordinary people doing extraordinary things. You endure. You persist and resist. And you refuse to give up despite the risk and the personal toll your work takes.

I commissioned a poem “Seeds of Hope” by Nikita Gill to celebrate the 25^th anniversary of the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights Defender. And I leave you with some lines from it:

               They say at the end of every tunnel, there is a light.

               What they do not tell you is that someone has to be there

               to hold up that light so that others can see the path,

               wielding the torch of truth, no matter how hard it is to bear.

 Thank you very much. I stand in solidarity with you.