Sima Samar

Sima Samar (born 3 February 1957) is an Afghan physician and human rights advocate who served as Afghanistan's first post-Taliban Minister of Women's Affairs, chaired the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission from 2002 to 2019, and was UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Sudan from 2005 to 2009. ^{1 2} She received the Right Livelihood Award in 2012 for her dedication to human rights, especially women's rights. ¹

Samar was born on 3 February 1957 in Jaghori, in Ghazni province; she belongs to the ethnic Hazara. ^{1 2} Encyclopedia.com gives the birth date as 4 February 1957, a variant recorded in her data record and not followed. ³ She obtained her degree in medicine in February 1982 at Kabul University and practised at a government hospital in Kabul before fleeing for her safety to her native Jaghori, where she treated patients across the remote areas of central Afghanistan. ¹

In 1984 the government of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan arrested her husband, who was never heard from again, and Samar fled with her young son to Pakistan. ^{1 3} There she worked as a doctor at the refugee branch of the Mission Hospital in Quetta, and in 1989, distressed by the lack of health care for Afghan refugee women, she established the Shuhada Organization and Shuhada Clinic in Quetta, dedicated to health care for Afghan women and girls, training of medical staff and education; further branches later opened across Afghanistan. ^{1 2}

After more than a decade as a refugee she returned in 2002 to a cabinet post in the Afghan Transitional Administration of Hamid Karzai, serving as Deputy Chairperson and then as the first Minister for Women's Affairs, in office from December 2001 to 2003. ¹ She was forced to resign after she was threatened with death and harassed over an interview in Canada in which she was reported to question conservative Islamic laws, especially sharia law; she denied the allegation attributed to her, and Encyclopedia.com records that she was acquitted of a blasphemy charge. ^{1 3} During the Loya Jirga period, religious conservatives took out a newspaper advertisement calling her the Salman Rushdie of Afghanistan — their label, reported here as such, not the museum's. ¹ The UN panel biography notes that her later human rights reporting likewise brought her death threats from those she reported on. ²

Samar headed the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission from 2002 to 2019, established the Gawharshad Institute of Higher Education in 2010, and served as UN Special Rapporteur on Sudan from 2005 to 2009. ¹ In 2019 UN Secretary-General António Guterres appointed her to the High-Level Panel on Internal Displacement. ^{1 2} She has publicly refused the position that women must be kept in purdah and has spoken against the enforced burqa, drawing attention to its health effects, including osteomalacia from lack of sunlight. ¹

Her awards include the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership (1994), the John Humphrey Freedom Award (2001), the Perdita Huston Human Rights Award (2003), the Geuzenpenning (2011) and the Right Livelihood Award (2012). ¹

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.
• Revisions of this article must be dated, and must name the source that changed each fact.