Human Rights First | Highlight from the 25th Anniversary Human Rights Award Dinner

Mehrangiz Kar, a lawyer and writer, was sentenced to four years in prison for advocating change in Iran at a 2000 conference in Berlin attended by many of Iran’s leading reformists. Kar’s arrest marked the beginning of a sustained crackdown on those calling for reform in Iran that continues to this day. She was finally allowed to leave Iran for urgent medical treatment while her case was under appeal. Her case remains open and she may face imprisonment if she returns home. After Kar’s departure from Iran, her husband Siamak Pourzand, was arrested for his own writing and, it is thought, as punishment for Kar’s continuing calls for reform. Pourzand is extremely ill while serving an 11 year prison term.

Helen Mack, has fought for more than a decade for justice for her sister, Guatemalan anthropologist Myrna Mack, who was assassinated in 1990 for exposing the killing of indigenous people by state forces. Despite death threats, Helen Mack pursued and won the conviction of a low ranking official in 1993 for her sister’s murder. In 2003, a colonel was found guilty of ordering Myrna Mack’s murder; he was the highest ranking officer ever convicted in Guatemala. After his conviction, the colonel fled and his whereabouts are unknown. In 2003 the Inter-American Court for Human Rights ordered the largest monetary reparations ever awarded in the Court to the Mack family. In 2004 President Oscar Berger publicly apologized to the Guatemalan people and the Mack family for Myrna’s murder.

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