Sudanese women’s rights activist Amira Osmane Hamed received the Human Rights Defenders at Risk Award from the international NGO Front Line Defenders on May 27, 2022.
An engineer in her forties, Ms. Hamed has been campaigning for the cause of women in Sudan for many years. She was first arrested in 2002 for wearing pants, then in 2013 for refusing to cover her hair. At the time, a Sudanese law prohibited women from uncovering or wearing pants in public. This law, which “transforms Sudanese women from victims to criminals”, according to Ms. Hamed, was finally repealed in 2019, after the military ousted President Omar al-Bashir, who ruled Sudan with an iron fist.
More recently, in January 2022, Amira Osmane Hamed was arrested before being released a week later for having denounced the military power after General Abdel Fattah al-Burhane’s putsch in October 2021. Relatives of Ms. Hamed had told AFP at the end of January that “30 armed and masked men” broke into his house in Khartoum in the middle of the night “and took her to an unknown destination”.
“Amira Osmane Hamed never turned away from her mission and continued to actively participate in peaceful protests.”
the NGO Front Line Defendersat AFP
Since General al-Burhane’s coup, thousands of Sudanese have regularly demonstrated to demand civilian rule, but the repression in this large East African country has already left 98 dead, hundreds injured and as many arrests, with no political outcome in sight. On May 28, 2022, two new demonstrators were killed in new anti-coup protests.
The UN envoy to Sudan, Volker Perthes, said he was “time to stop the violence and end the state of emergency”. The United Nations and the African Union plead for a political dialogue under penalty of seeing the country sink definitively “economically and safely”.
According to the UN, one in two Sudanese will suffer from hunger by the end of 2022 while the October putsch, by brutally ending a fragile division of power between civilians and soldiers, deprived Sudan of its international aid.