2015 Law to protect Human Rights defenders and journalists

In May 2015, Decree 134-2015 created the Law to protect human rights defenders, journalists and justice officials. In 2016 the regulatory code of the law was enacted. The 2015 law, modelled on similar experiences in the Latin American region, was passed in response to national and international pressure to address the wide range of threats and attacks on human rights defenders and grassroots media workers. The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights played an important role in promoting the initiative.

The law recognises the right of all persons individually and collectively to promote and demand human rights and establishes the obligation on the State to respect the rights of human rights defenders and prevent any act or omission threatening those rights. The law also establishes the obligation of the State to promote and respect human rights of all and create the conditions for empowerment and justiciability necessary to exercise those rights.

The law created an Early Alert mechanism to identify threats against human rights defenders and the duty of public authorities to protect those under threat. It also established the National System for the protection of human rights defenders as the locus of institutional coordination to ensure the effective protection of human rights in public policy and to identify, coordinate and implement measures to protect human rights defenders at risk. The executive decision-making organ of the System is the General Directorate, which forms part of the Ministry of Human Rights, Justice, Governance and Decentralization, which in 2018 became a separate Ministry of Human Rights. The consultative body of the System is the Council, which the law requires a wide range of institutional actors to participate in. The Council also includes two representatives of civil society.

The creation of the System promised to improve the recognition of human rights defenders in Honduras and commit government agencies to their effective protection. However, as the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders observed in 2019, the effectiveness of the protection measures is often in question and there is an understandable distrust of human rights defenders toward those providing protection:

“A significant number of the over 400 rights defenders with whom the Special Rapporteur met expressed a deep distrust of the national protection mechanism and, in particular, the police protection measures mentioned above. Defenders continue to identify the national police, the military police and the armed forces as the main perpetrators of human rights violations and attacks against defenders. It is therefore difficult for them to trust officers from these institutions to protect them by availing themselves of the measures provided for under the national mechanism” (Human Rights Council, 2019: 62).