Human Rights Defender of the month: Abacha Ahmed Ibrahim

March 2022
HRDs of the Month, News

Abacha Ahmed Ibrahim is one of his country’s leading advocates for the rights of Persons with Disabilities (PWDs).

Born 34 years ago into a family of Eight, in Kajokeji County, East of Juba, the Capital of South Sudan, Abacha ’s passion for human rights was born out of grim personal experience. At birth, he was immediately neglected by his father on discovering that the little infant was visually impaired.

“My own father denied me access to education because he considered my disability a kind of misfortune brought to him by my mother,” he says.

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Consequently, Abacha had to rely on his mother to fend for him through school, an experience that brought him face-face with the deep-seated and far-reaching social stigma against PWDs prevalent in South Sudan society and institutions.

“This (the stigma) was my earliest motivation – by the time I was getting done with secondary school, I was determined to pursue a career in human rights, particularly the rights of PWDs, to show that they too are people like others, he says.

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Today, Abacha works as a Senior Program Manager at Action for Community Education, one of the leading NGOs in Juba, where he manages education projects and human rights advocacy. Here, for the last 10 years, he has been organising people into local group focus discussions and community dialogues as a way of creating civic consciousness and creating social awareness about the importance of education and the human rights, including the rights of PWDs.

documented over 100 cases of missing persons, and helped locate about 60, from prisons to hospitals. Among these, at least five were found dead in city morgues.

“We mobilise all people including PWDs to participate in these discussions. That way, people are able to appreciate that no matter one’s physical ability, or disability, we all are human beings with common needs and aspirations. This contributes to eliminating stigma against PWDs,” he says.

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Like in many other countries around the region, Abacha notes that PWDs in South Sudan continue to face challenges, from poorly designed buildings with neither rumps nor lifts, no parking spaces designated to PWDs, to insufficient social welfare programs designed to uplift PWDs from poverty.

Things are made even more complicated by South Sudan’s history with political conflict.

“Working in the field of human rights in a country recovering from a civil war is not easy. There is a lot of suspicion, and it is difficult to pursue accountability. Oftentimes, we’re denied access to accountability institutions, we face threats and intimidation. In one such incident, I even received a death threat from one of our security agencies following an opinion I wrote in the press criticizing the human rights abuses in the country,” Abacha observes.

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Still, he is optimistic of better days ahead for human rights defenders and PWDs

“Recognition of persons with disability, community mindset and perception attitudes are gradually changing towards PWDs. The enactment of inclusive policies like the National Inclusive Education Policy 2014 and the South Sudan National Disability Inclusion Policy 2013 also shows that the authorities that be recognise the existence of an issue that needs to be addressed,” he says.

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There is still work to be done though. Abacha notes that there is need to among others ensure that PWDs participate in identifying barriers that impede their access, involve them in planning, designing, and implementing town building plans and community programs, include PWDs and their caregivers in community decision making structures and processes, and finally, to create a nationwide corporate environment with the right business strategy and attitude to recruit, hire, retain and advance the careers of PWDs.

“That is our next frontier,” he says.

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See more HRDs of the Month

Human Rights Defender of the month: Aida Musa

In August 2011, Aida crossed into Uganda, pregnant, and barely able to communicate in another language other than Arabic. The transition was a difficult one, she says: “It was my first-time outside Sudan, and yet I did not know any other language. The first months were very difficult.”
In 2012, still struggling to find her footing in Kampala, Aida was introduced to DefendDefenders, where she was introduced to the organisation’s resource center, and assured, it (the center) would be at her disposal whenever she needed to use it.

Human Rights Defender of the month: Pamela Angwench Judith

For most of her life, Pamela Angwech’s existence has always been a defiant and simultaneous act of survival and resistance. In 1976 when she was born, the anti-Amin movement was gathering pace, and her family was one of the earliest victims of the then dictatorship’s reprisals in Northern Uganda. Her father, a passionate educationist in Kitgum district was one of the most vocal critics of the dictatorship’s human rights excesses, which made him an obvious target of the state’s marauding vigilantes.

Human Rights Defender of the month: Joseph Oleshangay

As a human rights lawyer and advocate with the High Court of the United Republic of Tanzania, Joseph Moses Oleshangay spends most of his time crossing from one court to another, litigating human rights cases, some with life-altering implications for ordinary people. It is a monumental responsibility, one he never envisaged growing up.

As a young boy born into a Maasai household in northern Tanzania, his entire childhood revolved around cattle: “Our entire livelihood revolved around cattle. As a child, the main preoccupation was to tend to cows, and my formative years were spent grazing cattle around Endulen. It a simple lifestyle,” he says.

Human Rights Defender of the month: Julia Onyoti

The situation of South Sudan’s women and girls remains one of those enduring blights on the country’s conscience. The country retains the unenviable reputation of having the world’s highest maternal mortality rate, and at 51.5%, one of the highest cases of child marriages. It is even worse with gender-based violence(GBV): A 2019 study by UNICEF found that one in every two South Sudan women have experienced intimate partner violence, while a recent UN study, alarmed at the widespread nature of conflict-related sexual violence in the country, in which women are tread as “spoils of war” described it as “a hellish existence for women and girls.

Human Rights Defender of the month:SHIMA BHARE

Shima Bhare Abdalla has never known the luxury and comfort of a stable and safe existence inside her country’s borders. When she was 11, her village was attacked and razed to the ground, sending her family and entire neighborhood scattering into an internally displaced People’s Camp, at the start of the Darfur civil war.

That was in 2002. Shima and her family relocated into Kalma refugee camp in Southern Darfur, where, alongside over 100,000 other displaced persons, they had to forge out a living, under the watch and benevolence of the United Nations – African Union Hybrid Operation in Darfur, known as UNAMID. It is here that Shima’s human rights consciousness came to life. She enthusiastically embraced whatever little education she could access under the auspices of the humanitarian agencies operating in the camp, to be able to tell the story of her people’s plight.

Human Rights Defender of the month: Martial Pa’nucci

Martial Pa’nucci is a child of what is fondly known as Africa’s second liberation. In 1990 when he was born, the Republic of Congo, like many other countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, was undergoing a transition from one-party rule to multi-party democracy, following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Yet developments in ordinary people’s lives were not as optimistic. Pa’nucci was born in one of Brazzaville’s ghettos to a polygamous family of two mothers and 19 siblings, where survival was a daily exercise in courage. When he was two, his father died, followed in quick succession by many of his siblings. Pa’nucci did not start school until he was nine, and he had to do odd jobs – from barbering to plumbing to earn his stay there, lest he dropped out like many of his peers.

Human Rights Defender of the month: Veronica Almedom

Veronica Almedom is a poster child of successful immigration. A duo Eritrean and Swiss citizen, she was born in Italy, and grew up in Switzerland where she permanently resides. Her parents are some of the earliest victims of Eritrea’s cycles of violence. When Eritrea’s war of independence peaked in the early 1980s, they escaped the country as unaccompanied minors, wandering through Sudan, Saudi Arabia, before making the hazard journey across the Mediterranean into Europe. There, they crossed first to Italy, and finally, to Switzerland, where they settled first as refugees, and later, as permanent residents.

Human Rights Defender of the month: Omar Faruk Osman

Omar Faruk’s career, and the passion that drove it, were the product of his circumstances. He was born in 1976, in the first of strong man Mohamed Siad Barre’s two-decade rule over Somalia, which was characterized by gross rights abuses and barely existent civic space. He came of age in the 90s when those abuses and rights violations were peaking, as his country was engulfed by a ruinous civil war following the collapse of the Siad Barre dictatorship.

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