The Human Rights World Has a Sexual Harassment Problem - NOTUS (Allbritton Journalism Institute)
Haley Byrd Wilt
25–32 minutes

Esma Gün couldn’t believe the messages as they crossed her screen.

The conversation had been friendly but professional: two human rights activists celebrating a policy victory. Now, Dolkun Isa, president of the World Uyghur Congress, was saying he wanted to kiss her.

Gün, a Turkish-Belgian university student, was 22 at the time and relatively new to human rights advocacy. Isa, then 53 years old, didn’t stop when she pushed back, according to screenshots of the February 2021 conversation reviewed by NOTUS and an interview with Gün. “But I would really kiss you without letting you go,” Isa wrote to her in Turkish, according to an independent interpreter hired by NOTUS.

When Gün tried to change the subject, Isa persisted. “I would be so glad if you kissed me,” he told her.

Disconcerted, Gün limited their interactions. But the next month, Isa tried to convince her to meet with him.

“You’re always on my mind,” he wrote in a message he appears to have later deleted, according to screenshots taken by Gün. In another conversation, he urged her to visit. “It would be good for you if we could meet,” he said. “You could come over for a few days. We would talk about nice things, I would make you laugh, and so you could blow off some steam.”

Gün told him she felt awkward about the idea of meeting alone because her activist friends might want to join them. According to the screenshots translated by the independent interpreter, Isa responded that it would be better for her to “keep it just to yourself.”

“Why would we tell others about it?” he asked. “Do you share it with friends that we often talk like this?”

Gün now felt like she hadn’t been valued for her work, but for something else entirely. She felt disillusioned and wanted to avoid Isa, she said. She eventually quit activism.

Gün didn’t report the incidents to the World Uyghur Congress, and for years, she didn’t tell other activists.

“I didn’t want people to know their leader is someone like this,” she said. “Keeping hope is already difficult for them.”

Two other women, who are unaffiliated with Gün and asked to speak anonymously because they were worried about retaliation, claimed in separate interviews with NOTUS that Isa had also made unprofessional sexual advances with them.

Before this story was published, Isa declined to comment on those two women’s allegations and did not respond to multiple requests for comment on Gün’s claims sent to both a confirmed personal email address and the World Uyghur Congress. A spokesperson for the World Uyghur Congress did not address the claims when provided a detailed summary, but in an initial response told NOTUS “this may be an attempt to defame” the organization and its members and suggested it may take legal action. “As you can appreciate, any attack on them and us, even if untrue, will be seized upon by the Chinese regime and used against us,” the spokesperson said.

On Sunday, Isa publicly apologized in a statement on X: “I have a duty to admit serious errors of judgement, for which I apologise without reservation. While I never acted upon them, I deeply regret sending messages that caused discomfort and distress. To those who received them, and to those in the community who feel understandably let down, I am sorry.”

Isa said the World Uyghur Congress has not had a robust process to handle complaints in the past and invited people who have “felt discomfort” with his communication to meet to discuss “common solutions.”

“I didn’t want people to know their leader is someone like this,” she said. “Keeping hope is already difficult for them.”


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Human rights groups advocate for the oppressed, staring down tyrants and authoritarian governments. They’re a fixture in Washington, D.C., and other centers of power around the globe. They hold press conferences with lawmakers and testify before committees to fight genocide, forced labor and religious persecution. Wherever human dignity is being trampled, these groups exist to push back.

But interviews with 19 women involved in human rights activism in Asia, Europe and North America revealed a culture in which powerful men can get away with unprofessional and sometimes even predatory behavior without consequence.

People in this line of work have strong incentives to stay quiet about misconduct: Human rights advocacy is a small world, and almost everyone interviewed by NOTUS for this report shared fears they would hurt their careers — and damage the causes they believe in — by talking openly about this topic. When activists do speak up, they learn their cash-strapped organizations often don’t have robust procedures or the training to handle ethics investigations. People who allege misconduct can also face a very different kind of accusation from their colleagues: that they may be spies or influence agents for the Chinese government attempting to destroy a righteous cause.

In interviews, women described being assaulted, groped and propositioned for sex as they tried to do their work. Some said male co-workers and supervisors had acted aggressively while drunk, made degrading comments, talked about their sex lives, tried to invite themselves to hotel rooms and requested nude pictures. Almost all of those women said they weren’t sure where to go to report misconduct in their organizations, while others said they didn’t report it because they didn’t believe nonprofit leaders would actually address it if they did bring concerns forward.

Other behavior seemed comparatively innocuous, but women said it felt intended to catch them off guard and made them uncomfortable, such as men higher up in an organization frequently asking them out to drinks after work or texting them in the middle of the night and blaming the odd hours on travel.

Fed up with those dynamics, some activists at human rights organizations around the world have forced a reckoning over sexual harassment and abuse within their ranks. Since the summer of 2022, those conversations have made advocacy events tense, captured the Chinese government’s attention and ricocheted around Capitol Hill, where staffers have debated whether to host certain leaders despite allegations implicating them.

Some of the accusers have faced vitriol for talking about their experiences. They’ve also found out just how unprepared some nonprofits are to address sexual misconduct.

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https://www.notus.org/policy/human-r...ual-harassment

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