1. Short title This Act may be cited as the Human Rights Defenders Protection Act of 2024 . 2. Findings Congress finds the following: (1) Around the world, human rights defenders form the backbone of democratic societies and movements, advocating for human rights and political freedoms, protecting the environment, fighting corruption, and supporting good governance, independent media, and labor rights. (2) Reprisals against human rights defenders are on the rise as autocratic and illiberal regimes increasingly target human rights defenders with fabricated legal charges, threats and violence for exercising civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights, often collaborating with transnational criminal organizations, paramilitary groups, private sector actors, and others to carry out such reprisals. (3) According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, every year hundreds of human rights defenders are murdered and thousands more are subjected to torture, enforced disappearance, sexual violence, hate crimes, unlawful or arbitrary detention, judicial harassment, unlawful or arbitrary digital surveillance, and forced exile. (4) The lack of accountability for attacks on human rights defenders engenders further violence and leaves human rights defenders hesitant or unable to continue their work out of fear of retaliation. (5) Foreign governments are no longer oppressing only individuals within the borders of their countries and are increasingly resorting to transnational repression tactics, both digital and physical, to target human rights defenders outside of their countries of origin, often where such human rights defenders are seeking asylum or temporary refuge. (6) Human rights defenders facing the highest levels of violence include individuals advocating for land rights and environmental issues, Indigenous communities, the freedoms of expression, assembly, and association, minority communities, and LGBTQI+, women’s, youth, and religious rights. (7) Environmental human rights defenders are