Helena Dias

Helena Bertho Dias is a co-founder and the editorial director of Revista AzMina, which is an independent feminist media organization in Brazil, covering women right’s issues and monitoring violence against women in the country. Her work focuses on the topics of gender, feminism, reproductive and sexual rights as well as human rights. Helena has a degree in Social Communication and Journalism from the University of São Paulo.

In 2019, because of a text that Helena wrote on abortion, she and her organization AzMina received a lot of attention from federal government members, criminal complaints, judicial harassment and online harassment. AzMina is still being targeted on social media with threats, insults and hate campaigns. Due to AzMina´s work, there have been repeated attempts to hack their website and accounts of the team.

In 2020 as part of the Berlin Scholarship Program, Helena participated in the RSF workshop “Building Digital Security for Journalists“ at the Internet Governance Forum from the United Nations and spoke about digital attacks against journalists in Brazil. At the Berlin Scholarship Program Helena is learning how to protect herself better and provide more security for the organization and the team.