Human rights defenders are in a dangerous business, so who looks out for them? The director of Front Line talks to Rosita Boland

A Dublin-based international foundation has just become the first Irish organisation to win a highly prestigious award, the 2006-2007 King Baudouin International Development Prize. Front Line, the International Foundation for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders, will not only receive €150,000 when the award is presented in Brussels in May, but also see its profile rise internationally. In the past, this biennial award, created in 1978 and named after the late king of Belgium, has been awarded to Muhammad Yunus of the Grameen Bank, who later went on to win the Nobel peace prize, and to the Fairtrade Labelling Organisations International.

Dubliner Mary Lawlor, a long-time worker in human rights, is the committed and modest director of Front Line, which she set up in 2001. She hurries through the wind in Blackrock, Co Dublin, trying to make it to a cafe before the rain starts. She does a lot of hurrying: our interview is early in the morning and although she only arrived back late the previous night from reviewing an overseas project, she's so full of energy to start talking about Front Line's work that between one side of the main street and the other, half a dozen countries have been mentioned.

Lawlor can recall exactly when she first became aware of what human rights were, and the lack of them. "I was 16 and on an exchange with a family in Paris. They took me to an exhibition in the Pompidou Centre about the holocaust. It made a huge impression on me. In those days, nothing was taught in Irish schools about human rights."

Lawlor read philosophy and psychology at UCD, and she took a summer job in Canada selling Merit of Canada encyclopedias door to door. "The ad asked for people who wanted to become involved with education on a personal basis," she recalls wryly. Lawlor proved herself to be an astute saleswoman, selling two sets her very first night, at $100 commission a set - a large sum for 1973. The rest of the summer went equally well.

After UCD, she did a postgraduate degree in Montessori teaching, taught by day and successfully studied for her Institute of Personnel exams by night. By then, the first of her three children had been born, Christopher, now 26, and she opened her own Montessori school.

"I joined Amnesty at that point, when I was 27, and I went on the board right away, because there wasn't really anyone around then who wanted to get involved who was, I suppose, young." She was on the board for 14 years as a volunteer, giving up to 25 hours a week to fundraising, trying to set up support groups, and galvanising people to write letters to political prisoners.

"I retired from the board in 1987 and vowed I was going to spend more time at home with my young family. But the next year, a job came up for the directorship of Amnesty and I applied and was offered the job." She hesitates for a second and adds: "I was told later I was the second choice - the first person had wanted too much money." Even at the distance of 20 years, there is a noticeable tone of distaste in Lawlor's voice.

By the time she left Amnesty in 2000, there were 14,000 members in Ireland. "I wanted to do something else, and I had the idea to set up a foundation to protect those people who work to defend human rights. There wasn't - and still isn't - any other international foundation that does this. I knew for it to succeed, that I needed three things: a vision or idea, a plan, and money.

Lawlor's years of experience in running her own business and working in human rights had supplied her with the vision and the plan. The money came from an unexpected source: businessman Denis O'Brien. Lawlor, knowing him as a human rights supporter, went to him with a business plan. "My meeting was good timing - his first baby had been born the night before, and you look at the world a bit differently when that happens."

O'Brien gave Front Line $3 million (€2.4 million). It was enough to set up the foundation in 2001, and Lawlor set about writing to prominent people to ask them to lend their names to it. "When you're starting something new and want to fast-track it, you need credibility." Among those she persuaded to put their names to Front Line's honorary Leadership Council are the Dalai Lama, Bono and Nobel peace prize winners, Desmond Tutu and Argentinian Adolfo Pérez Esquivel.

Based in Blackrock, Front Line now employs 12 people, and is funded by the Government as well as public donations and private foundations: it costs €1 million a year to run the organisation. It has more than 14,000 human rights defenders worldwide on its database. Early on, it reached these people via other international bodies, but now people are contacting Front Line directly.

"Human rights defenders are those who try to support people whose rights have been violated - unfair trials, prison sentences, land rights, freedom of expression, freedom of association. They are the agents of social change and they are effective, otherwise governments wouldn't be trying to silence them," Lawlor explains.

In three decades, Lawlor has seen little change in the kind of human rights violations that occur, but has seen a definite change in the way governments of countries who are in violation of human rights communicate with NGOs such as themselves. Intimidation of human rights defenders can be sometimes almost as effective as physically harming them, and is much harder to prove conclusively.

"Governments have adopted the language of human rights and hijacked the ground from under the NGOs, forcing them sometimes to engage with governments to protect human rights defenders. They have also got much more sophisticated. They don't always kill or torture people now. They imprison them or disappear them. Or, say someone is a lawyer and working for human rights on a voluntary basis, they intimidate their clients so that their livelihood disappears. Or they turn them out of their houses."

Front Line works with defenders in a number of ways. Last year alone it provided 55 individuals and organisations with security grants, including computer protection programmes; took up the cases of 196 defenders at risk; published reports on the situations of defenders in central Asia, Guatemala and occupied Palestinian territory; conducted training in security in eight countries; and went out to meet defenders in China, Uganda, Thailand, Nepal, Bahrain and Western Sahara.

"Technology has really helped defenders in recent years. We now get text messages when people are arrested, or e-mails from friends, telling us when something has happened to a defender. Or we hear via e-mails when a sensitive march is going to happen, and we can get people in to monitor it."

Front Line also holds a biennial international platform for 100 defenders at Dublin Castle, designed to promote, among other things, interaction and lobbying skills. The next one will be held in November, and Lawlor will be putting Front Line's €150,000 prize-money from the King Baudouin award toward organising it. First, she has to go to Brussels to collect the award at a ceremony in May. If people were still selling Merit of Canada encyclopedias door to door, it's a fair bet that Front Line would now have a listing in them.

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Practical helpAloysius Toe in Liberia

In November 2002 Aloysius Toe, a leading human rights defender in Liberia, was arrested then falsely charged with treason and imprisoned for eight months pending trial. In his words:

"My ordeal followed five months of sustained advocacy and legal campaigns against the Liberian government against the arbitrary arrest, torturous detention and incommunicado treatment of a Liberian journalist and over 40 other ethnic mandigoes [ religious minorities].I spent eight months in prison pending trial. I escaped on the morning of June 22nd, 2003 under a heavy downpour of rain. It happened when the prison guards abandoned the prison compound to escape the explosion of bombs, mortar shells and rocket grenades from advancing rebel forces in the vicinity of the prison.

"I sought refuge at a friend's residence but later moved to another location, having been spotted first by government loyalists, and then due to a rocket grenade which blew up and killed a family of four right before my eyes. With political support from the Irish State and financial support from Front Line, I escaped from Liberia under the cover of darkness during the night of July 6th, 2003 on a tiny fishing canoe. After four days of stormy sea travel, I finally made my way to the Ivorian City of San Pedro. My home was severely looted and everything taken away. But with help from Front Line, my family had mattresses to sleep on.

"I can boldly proclaim that no international organisation has so practical, pragmatic, responsive [and able to] undo procrastinating bureaucracy to carry defenders under threats to safety as Front Line.

Dealing with threatsClaudia Duque in Colombia

Front Line assisted with the evacuation of Claudia Duque from Colombia to a safe country in December 2004, and she stayed in exile until January 2006. Duque is a journalist and was working with the José Alvear Restrepo Lawyers' Collective at the time of the threats. She was researching the case of Colombian comedian and journalist, Jaime Garzón, who was killed on August 13th, 1999.

Along with threatening phone-calls, voicemails and text messages since September 2004, Duque had been followed and her home had been patrolled. One of the threats she received said: "Although it hurts us, we have no other option but to kill your daughter, even if you go around in an armoured car, your daughter will suffer, we are going to burn her alive, we are going to scatter her fingers all over the place."

Front Line evacuated Duque and her daughter, and she received training in security. When she returned to work in Colombia in 2006 she used the checklist from the Front Line Protection Manual to evaluate where to set up a new home, and implemented several other measures with regard to routines and communications. Duque was also a trainer in a security training workshop organised by Front Line in Guatemala in November 2006. She continues to face serious risks in her work for human rights in Colombia.