“I’m very afraid,” says Colombian lawyer Adil Meléndez Márquez, the day after being presented with an award in London honouring human rights defenders.
Meléndez is no stranger to death threats, because of his work on cases related to Colombia’s decades-long civil war, environmental justice and corruption, but things have just got a lot scarier. With bitter irony, 20 minutes after receiving the Sir Henry Brooke award from the Alliance for Lawyers at Risk, his bodyguards called him to say that they had been stood down from, leaving him without protection.
