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CELEBRATION OF LIFE: Remembering Those Lives We Often Forget

JANUARY, 24TH, 2016 - Join us for a celebratory event in Los Angeles, California, to highlight the achievements of human rights defenders around the globe. #FreedomOfConscience

An evening of music, poetry, and appearances by prominent human rights advocates such as Mayor Eric Garcetti, Ensaf Haider (Author and Wife of Raif Badawi), David Kaye, Karima Bennoune, Reza Aslan, their families and their celebrity supporters, to draw attention to pervasive threats to human rights, which can be thwarted only with education and the freedom to think critically. 

Would you like to sponsor this event or purchase a Solidarity Ad in our program? Learn more here.

IN HONOR OF:

  • Raif Badawi - imprisoned for 10 years and sentenced to 1000 lashes for critically analyzing the oppressive theocracy and archaic status quo in Saudi Arabia.

  • Waleed Abu Al-Khair - Raif's lawyer, sentenced to 15 years for defending Badawi’s right to free speech.

  • Farkhunda Malikzada - a 27 year old theology teacher who publicly opposed a prominent mullah who sold charms & took advantage of the poor, was lynched by a mob of over 50 men in Afghanistan.

  • Samira al-Nuaimy - tortured and murdered at the hands of the so-called Islamic State in Iraq after criticizing its barbarism and destruction of Islamic heritage sites.

  • Salwa Bugaighis - lawyer, political & human rights activist, murdered in Libya for fostering egalitarian governance.

  • Sabeen Mahmud - human rights activist & NGO worker, assassinated for shedding light on the atrocities faced by minorities in Pakistan.

  • Saado Ali Warsame - a Somalian parliamentarian and singer of socially relevant songs who was gunned down by Al Shabaab in 2014.

  • Nisha Ayub - arrested, fined and charged simply for being transgendered in Malaysia.

  • Islam Behery -  a progressive Islamic scholar jailed for challenging Sunni Islam's al-Azhar University religious ideology in Egypt.

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