Risking everything to stand up for human rights in exile

Wendy Flores, a human rights defender from Nicaragua, had to leave her country after defending other victims and supporting their rights. She studied law and later joined the Nicaraguan Centre for Human Rights. The protests of April 2018 led by environmental groups, the rural peasant population and students against the government’s slow and insufficient response to forest fires in the Indio Maíz Biological Reserve, resulted in the repression of the protesters, the criminalization of demonstrators and their arrests. More than 3,600 civil society organizations have been canceled in Nicaragua during the last five years. Flores fled Nicaragua due to the risk of being criminalized for defending human rights and putting her family in danger.