On the morning of April 9, 2011, Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, founder and president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, was forcibly arrested by Bahraini authorities.

He was physically assaulted, taken without an arrest warrant, and locked away for weeks until a trial began, during which he was sentenced to life in prison for conspiring to overthrow the government and spying for a foreign country.

His crimes? Organizing peaceful demonstrations and demanding accountability for the Bahraini government’s role in targeting protestors.

As the global conditions for civic society worsen — with only 3.2% of the world’s population living in countries where civic space is considered open, according to the international global alliance CIVICUS — human rights defenders (HRDs) like al-Khawaja increasingly face the risk of government retaliation.

Without warning, they can be arrested, tortured, detained, and charged for crimes that have no connection to their human rights work, but for which their governments hold them accountable.

“The detention of HRDs is often arbitrary and a form of reprisal for the work [they] do,” David Kode, advocacy and campaigns lead at CIVICUS, told Global Citizen. “Take al-Khawaja, for example, who has been in prison since 2011 and is serving a life sentence. Despite many advocacy efforts, the Bahraini authorities seem to be bent on ‘punishing’ him and his family for calling for democratic reforms more than a decade ago.”

Made up of civil society organizations and activists across more than 175 countries, CIVICUS has been campaigning on behalf of HRDs since its founding in 1993. As part of their work, the Stand As My Witness campaign — launched over 10 years ago — has sought to encourage investigations into unlawful imprisonments and bring global attention to cases like al-Khawaja’s.

Stand As My Witness was created in response to a growing trend in which civil society actors were arrested for their human rights work. Formerly known as Civil Society Behind Bars, the initiative is one of CIVICUS' most effective strategies when it comes to sounding the alarm about the plights faced by HRDs around the world.

Read the full article about human rights defenders by Jaxx Artz at Global Citizen.