A UN panel of experts sentenced the latest murder of a Mexican human rights activist on Wednesday and called for a thorough, impartial and transparent investigation by state authorities.
Sael Silva Cisneros, a prominent lawyer and advocate for Afro-Mexican and LGBTQ rights, was killed in an attack outside the city of Cuajinicuilapa on June 5, shortly after she gave a seminar titled “Afro-Mexican Dissidences in Guerrero: History, Justice and Rights.” Silva Cisneros has a history of advocating for the rights of Afro-Mexicans and documenting the systemic intersectional marginalization of this community in Mexico and abroad. The city of Cuajinicuilapa is located near the southwest coast of Mexico, a heartland of the Afro-Mexican population.
Silva Cisneros had also worked as a researcher for the Supreme Court of Mexico, which published a opinion after his murder, praised his work and condemned “all forms of violence that attack the dignity, equality and human rights of the individual.”
The UN experts reiterated Mexico’s commitment under international human rights treaties to protect marginalized groups, particularly those subjected to intersectional and intersecting forms of discrimination, and to dismantle the systemic forces that fuel these abuses. They also called on Mexico to “ensure truth, justice, full reparation and guarantees that the abuses will not be repeated.”
Mexico currently has, and has historically had, one of the highest rates of attacks on human rights defenders criticized by the United Nations for its failure to protect activists despite the law’s passage Law on the Protection of Human Rights Defenders and Journalists in 2012.
