At the EUTRP Annual Meeting 2026 in Bilbao, one message came through with particular urgency, echoed across regions, thematic ecosystems and years of frontline experience: psychosocial support for human rights defenders is still too often provided in a bubble, organisation by organisation, disconnected from the wider ecosystem meant to protect defenders as a whole. If protection is to be holistic, this has to change.
What was equally clear in Bilbao, though, is that this is not a story of neglect. Across the ecosystem, organisations are increasingly placing mental health at the centre of their protection work, not as an afterthought, but as a priority in its own right. A wide range of entities, from grassroots organisations to international networks, fully understand what is at stake, and are actively providing, or working hard to provide, the kind of psychosocial support defenders need. The commitment and the awareness are there. What remains is turning that shared understanding into shared capacity, because centrality of mental health in intention has to translate into centrality of mental health in practice.
This is also a moment where that case can be made formally, at the highest level. The Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders has opened a call for input for an upcoming thematic report to the 64th session of the Human Rights Council, focused specifically on the mental health and psychosocial well-being of human rights defenders. The Special Rapporteur is inviting States, national human rights institutions, civil society organisations, defenders themselves, medical and mental health professionals, academics, UN entities, regional organisations, donors, and other stakeholders to contribute. (LINK) The report will examine the challenges defenders face in maintaining their mental health, identify barriers to accessing adequate support, and highlight promising practices that help create environments where defenders can work safely and sustainably.
A need that is specific, not generic
Supporting the mental health of a human rights defender before, during, and after relocation is not the same as offering general psychological care. It requires an understanding of trauma linked to persecution, exile, surveillance, criminalisation, and the particular weight of having built a life around defending others.
And within that, the need is not uniform. A land rights defender who has survived a violent eviction carries a different kind of trauma than a lawyer who has spent years under judicial harassment, which is different again from a journalist who has witnessed atrocities, been threatened for their reporting, or lived through the specific isolation of exile from their profession. A therapist without exposure to these realities, however well-trained in general terms, may simply not have the frame of reference to understand what a defender is describing, or why certain experiences carry the weight they do. A journalist processing the trauma of reporting from a warzone, for instance, needs a therapist who understands what that work actually involves, the pressure of bearing witness, the guilt of leaving, the identity bound up in a profession that cannot simply be paused. The same logic extends to every category of defender: the support has to be targeted, not average.
This is precisely the specialisation many organisations still cannot provide. Few have a dedicated psychologist or psychotherapist on staff at all, let alone one trained to work with defenders’ specific realities. This is not a matter of will, the organisations working closest to defenders are often the ones most acutely aware of what’s missing. It is a matter of capacity.
The no man’s land before and after
The gap is starkest at the edges of relocation. Support tends to concentrate on the period of relocation itself, understandably, since that is often when the crisis is most visible and resources are most readily mobilised. But the moments before and after are too often left unsupported, or supported inconsistently, not because organisations don’t care, but because sustaining specialised care beyond the acute phase requires capacity most simply don’t have.
This is precisely when stress peaks. Before relocation, defenders face the disorientation of an unravelling situation, often while still trying to continue their work. After, they face the return, to environments where the threat that forced them to leave may not have diminished at all, but where the support structure has quietly disappeared. Without continuity of care across this whole arc, the risk is real: defenders return more exposed, and more alone psychologically, than when they left. The stress does not end when the relocation period ends; for many, it intensifies.
Why this has to be a network, not isolated efforts
Almost no single organisation, however well-resourced, can build this level of specialised capacity alone, psychosocial support has to be built as shared infrastructure, not a bubble each actor tries to fill on their own.
This means networks that genuinely know each other, not just as names on a directory, but as trusted partners with visibility into each other’s expertise. It means building shared rosters of specialised practitioners: therapists and psychologists who understand the specific contexts defenders come from, and who any organisation in the ecosystem can call on when their own capacity runs out. Knowledge-sharing, referral pathways, and peer learning are not soft add-ons to this work; they are what make targeted, sustained support possible at all.
Funding psychosocial support as core protection, not a bonus
This is why psychosocial support cannot be treated as a line item funded only “if there’s money left over.” It is not an extra. It is core protection infrastructure, on the same footing as legal aid, emergency grants, or relocation itself, because a defender who is not supported psychologically before, during and after relocation is not fully protected, whatever else is in place.
This has direct implications for how the sector advocates with donors and decision-makers. The case has to be made explicitly: specialised psychosocial support, sustained across the full arc of a defender’s journey, is not a “nice to have” that follows once operational costs are covered. It is foundational to protection working at all, and it should be funded, resourced and planned for as such, from the outset.
Turning fragmentation into collective strength
The challenges are many, and no actor in this ecosystem is under the illusion that they are simple. But that is exactly why the work coming out of Bilbao, coordinating, sharing, building collective capacity across the EUTRP network, matters. Moving from fragmented, bubble-like efforts to a connected ecosystem of shared knowledge and specialised care is not a long-term aspiration. It is the only way to meet the psychosocial needs defenders actually have, at the scale they need them met.
