Six South Asian Women Human Rights Defenders Tell Their Stories

Amnesty International’s International Women’s Day feature interviews six women human rights defenders from across South Asia: Laila Haidari, Sara Hossain, Fareesha Abdulla, Charimaya Tamang, Veeru Kohli, and Sithi Umma. Their work spans addiction and poverty, civil liberties, trafficking, bonded labor, enforced disappearance, and political accountability.

Read together, the interviews resist a single story of ‘South Asian women.’ The activists occupy different legal systems, religions, classes, ethnic positions, and relationships to the state. What connects them is not an essential regional identity but the gendered form retaliation takes: sexualized defamation, threats to family, accusations of immorality, and the expectation that women should serve communities without claiming political authority.

The interview details keep that comparison grounded. Laila Haidari describes funding and sexualized abuse directed at her work supporting people with addiction; Charimaya Tamang draws on her experience of trafficking and founded Shakti Samuha to organize against it. Veeru Kohli, herself formerly bonded, calls not only for an end to bonded labor but for rehabilitation and land for freed families. Sithi Umma’s demand is for truth about her son, who disappeared in 2009. Sara Hossain insists that defenders protect rights across caste, class, sexuality and political belief; Fareesha Abdulla emphasizes civil liberties and the use of law. Their differences are the point: rights work includes economic survival, care, memory, and constitutional freedom, not one exportable activist script.

The short question-and-answer format cannot provide a full history of each struggle, and an international NGO’s framing may smooth ideological differences. It is best used as a map leading to the organizations and local archives around each defender. Its feminist value lies in expanding the meaning of women’s rights work: defending democracy, minorities, disappeared people, and economic survival is not separate from feminism when gender determines who may speak, whose grief becomes public, and who is punished for demanding accountability. Read the six interviews in Amnesty’s original feature as testimony and an entry point, not a complete regional history.