Imprisoned Indian activist Umar Khalid wins Front Line Defenders Award

Former Indian student leader and Jawaharlal Nehru University scholar Umar Khalid has won the prestigious 2026 Award for Human Rights Defenders at Risk.

Khalid, who has been in prison for more than six years in connection with the 2020 Delhi riots on charges of conspiracy, was honoured alongside four other human rights defenders who have refused to be silenced.

Ireland-based human rights organisation Front Line Defenders (FLD) presented the awards at a ceremony in Dublin on Thursday. Khalid was unable to attend the event.

The other recipients of this year’s award are Ahmadreza Haeri, a Kurdish anti-death-penalty campaigner from Iran; Laurinda Manuel Gouveia, a woman human rights defender from Angola; Adda Vyctoria Caetano, a Black transgender woman leader from Brazil; and Ljiljana Nešić, a feminist human rights defender from Serbia.

“To those who try to silence his work, he is an ‘enemy of the state’ and an ‘anti-national’, but to others, he is a national hero, a voice of the people, and a human rights defender,” FLD said in a statement.

The organisation said Khalid had been jailed for his leadership in the peaceful, democratic civil movement against amendments to India’s citizenship laws that it described as unconstitutional and anti-Muslim.

The amendments, FLD said, came amid an increasingly hostile climate fuelled by rising Hindu nationalism, threatening to disproportionately strip Muslims of documentation and legal status.

“Umar Khalid, with a steady trajectory defending students’, minorities’ and citizens’ rights, is seen as one of the key voices speaking out against this injustice,” it added.

Khalid was arrested on September 13, 2020, and has remained in jail without trial since then.