Welcome back to the podcast, Brib, Swindle, or Steel.

I'm Alexander Rogge and today we're talking with Mary Lawler.

Mary is currently the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders

and has been since May 2020. She's also an adjunct professor of business and human rights in the Center for Social

Innovation School of Business at the Beautiful Trinity College, Dublin.

She served as the director of the Irish section of Amnesty International from 1988 to 2008 to 2000.

Mary, thank you for joining me.

Thank you. Can you start, please, by describing your role as special rapporteur. That's not a role that a lot of our listeners will be

familiar with. A special rapporteur is one of 58 experts appointed by the UN Human Rights Council to promote human rights. And different

special rapporteurs look at different themes. So my mandate is the protection of human rights defenders.

But there are other people who have been appointed to look at torture or freedom of expression or health,

then there are country rapporteurs. There is one, say, on Somalia and Iran and other countries.

And the idea is that we are independent. We're independent of states. We're independent of NGOs and we are

independent of the UN itself. How do you use that position? Is it primarily a research based?

Is it gathering groups and interview based? Some mandate holders take an approach base, but I come from an activist background.

I set up frontline defenders in 2001 to help protect human rights defenders around the

world. So I come at it from a people-centered approach. And this mandate was created in recognition of

the fact that people were being persecuted all around the world for defending human rights. And it is

my mandate's role to monitor and report on and respond to situations where human rights defenders

are threatened or attacked

or detained or killed or whatever the violation against them is. And we know that human rights

defence particularly are very vulnerable in specific situations. So I decided that when I became mandate holder, I was going to concentrate on

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