By Michael Filtz

In her work as a women’s rights advocate, Marianne Mollmann is driven by the personal stories of the people with whom she works. Women like Veronica Cruz, a women’s rights advocate in Mexico, who was honored in 2006 by Human Rights Watch. “She’s a personal hero of mine,” Mollmann said. “She doesn’t have to go into the poorest communities in the poorest countries and work to help women one at a time, but she does.”

Cruz founded a group called Las Libres (The Free Women) which seeks to help rape victims get access to legal abortion services. She travels to rural villages in Mexico to teach women about their reproductive rights. Government officials in such regions are generally opposed to providing birth control and abortion is illegal unless the pregnancy is the result of rape, so prosecutors and doctors can be aggressive toward those who try to counsel women about these subjects; Cruz was courting trouble by doing the work that so inspired Mollmann.

But she was able to help Cruz: in 2006, Mollmann, then a researcher in the Women’s Rights Division at Human Rights Watch, released a report titled “The Second Assault: Obstructing Access to Legal Abortion after Rape in Mexico.” It described in painful detail the hardships and abuses faced by Mexican women seeking legal abortion in cases of rape and incest, and it documented the work that Cruz had done. The publicity generated by “The Second Assault” provided Cruz with independent evidence of the claims she had made all along: that women are routinely denied their rights. “At the very least,” Mollmann said, “before this report came out she would have been questioned, but the report made it impossible for the authorities to ignore her.”

This is one of the main effects that Mollmann hopes to promote – to win for others the freedom to carry out work that helps women everywhere.

“The Second Assault” prompted Mexican officials at the federal level to look for ways to fix ambiguities in the laws that harmed women, such as the uneven enforcement of laws granting legal abortions to rape victims. Often, doctors would refuse to perform abortions even in cases of rape. Since the report was released the Women’s Rights division has been working with lawmakers in Mexico to enforce these types of laws.

Unfortunately, the results of women’s rights research are not always as positive as in the Mexican case. Mollmann, who is now advocacy director in the Women’s Rights division, occasionally gets frustrated, because the problems can be so fundamental that that it’s hard to reach even the most basic of agreements. “Sometimes, when you talk to people, you feel like banging your head against a wall,” she said. “It’s hard to even agree on the lowest common denominator – that women are human beings of equal value to men.”

Mollmann’s mission is to end such prejudice and the human rights violations it fuels. She started out at Human Rights Watch researching and writing reports, and has moved on to full-time advocacy. Mollmann is now deeply engaged in trying to ensure that governments and international institutions uphold existing standards. But she’s also “working on the system so that women’s rights advocacy is not so hard.”

For months, Mollmann labored with women’s groups from war-torn Congo, governments, and representatives from other international nongovernmental organizations to achieve the first crucial step in setting up a permanent structure for the United Nations Security Council to address rampant sexual violence in conflict situations effectively. In June 2008, the Security Council adopted a resolution that forces the UN system to gather information and report on sexual violence in conflict and post-conflict zones.

Until then, the Security Council – which is charged with protecting international peace and security – often neither received nor requested information on sexual violence. As a result, UN peacekeepers were not explicitly mandated to protect civilians from such violence (and therefore often didn’t), and some Security Council members used the lack of information to justify further failure to act. The new measure should put sexual violence in wartime on the agenda and therefore, Mollmann hopes, make it less acceptable.

Mollmann has also been working with a group of women’s organizations to make the UN Human Rights Council set aside more time to talk about abuse targeted at women and girls. The council’s predecessor, the Human Rights Commission, reserved a mere 3 percent of its time for the human rights of women, and tended to focus that time exclusively on violence. Thanks to the advocacy carried out by Mollmann and her allies, the council is now required to address the full spectrum of women’s human rights, and to deal with sex discrimination in all of its work and sessions.

In the end, Mollmann – whose background and experience spans media, grassroots organizing, not-for-profit management, social research, and advertising – believes that change happens through collaboration and joint action at all levels.

“I am privileged to be able to use my voice for positive change with an organization like Human Rights Watch,” she said. “But I see my work as a complement to what Veronica does in the rural communities in Mexico and to what many women try to do at home. We’re all striving for a life with equality, dignity, and respect for everyone, man or woman.”