Juana Ruiz Sánchez
Juana Ruiz Sánchez is a Spanish woman human rights defender. She has been working as a project coordinator for 28 years at the Health Work Committee (HWC), an NGO providing health assistance in rural Palestinian villages across the West Bank. She presented the projects in Spain to institutions and donors. She lived with her husband in Beit Sahour, a Palestinian pharmacist, to whom she has been married for 35 years. Along with her work and in the international context, it is likely that the human rights defender has also been targeted for being the wife of a Palestinian man.
Human rights defenders in the OPT are subjected to acts of harassment, restrictions on freedom of movement, stigmatisation, abductions, long periods of arbitrary detention usually under administrative detention orders, illegal searches of their homes and offices and killings.
