Sudanese women’s activist Amira Osman Hamed has won a Front Line Defenders Award for Human Rights Defenders at Risk, the organisation an-nounced Friday. The activist and engineer, now in her forties, has been advocating for Sudanese women for two dec-ades, and was detained this year in a crackdown following the country’s latest coup.
She was among defenders from Afghanistan, Belarus, Zimbabwe and Mexico who also received the 2022 award for Human Rights Defenders at Risk.
Osman “never deterred from her mission,” Dub-lin-based Front Line Defenders said in its awards announcement, “consistently (advocating) for de-mocracy, human rights, and women’s rights.”
After first being charged for wearing trousers in 2002, she drew international support in 2013 when she was detained and threatened with flogging for refusing to wear a headscarf.
Both charges fell under morality laws during the rule of longtime autocrat Omar al-Bashir who took power in an Islamist-backed coup. Osman told AFP at the time that the morality laws had “changed Su-danese women from victims to criminals” and tar-geted “the dignity of Sudanese people.”—AP
