"It's easier to fight cancer than to fight an archaic mindset." Those were Nima Habashneh's last words on camera before she passed away this week. The 55-year-old Jordanian spent her last decade fighting for the rights of Jordanian women to pass on their citizenship to their spouses and children.

Around 84,000 Jordanian women are married to foreign citizens in Jordan with some 340,000 children from these marriages unable, until recently, to access the same basic rights of children with Jordanian nationality. Nima's campaign achieved victory in November last year when the government finally approved to grant certain rights to children of Jordanian women married to foreigners.

In 2011, I began following her activism work, saw her at protests and read her petitions. When I began researching more about the struggle of children who felt Jordanian but were alienated legally because their father was a foreigner, I decided to meet Nima and learn about her story.

We met on a cold November evening. She was a few minutes late to the interview and when I called her, I suddenly saw her hurrying up the escalator carrying a black bag with her two daughters walking behind her. She wore a beige sweater and a brown hijab and when she saw me, she quickly embraced me even though I had never met her.

I remember how she often walked in a hurry and spoke quickly, as if time was never on her side. She was excitable and optimistic even when she spoke about so many obstacles and failures. She told me about her family, how she fell in love with a Moroccan man, and how she refused to move to any other country other than her own. When she had her six children, she never thought that her struggle for their basic rights would become her life-long cause.

Like the majority of Jordanian women, she didn't work. All her children began attending school but she found herself having opinions and ideas but not knowing where to express them. She began posting comments in an online chat forum, and then she created a blog.

In 2011, when the Arab Spring fever spread across the region and protests were a more common sight, Nima took her online opinions offline and into the streets.

She reached out to many women to encourage them to join her in her first protest. She spoke to women like her, who were living in Jordan and also struggling because they were married to foreigners and their children lacked basic rights as non-citizens. None of the women showed up. When she called them, some turned off their cellphones, she told me during the interview. Her Facebook Page called 'My Mother is Jordanian and Her Citizenship is My Right" was hacked. She received threatening messages.

Still it didn't take others much time to understand that her campaign was, as she called it, "a national cause". More women began showing up at protests, signed petitions and met regularly. Almost 10,000 people joined her new Facebook page. Nima began appearing on radio stations, demanding she meet with politicians and decision-makers until she eventually found herself at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland speaking about her cause and representing a nation.

Nima shared with her online followers the story I wrote about the struggle for gender equality in Jordan. She would call me often to invite me to press conferences or events or she would ask me if I listened to her interview on the radio or her appearance on a television show. As always, she was excitable, warm and busy.

Nima was bigger than her cause. For ordinary Jordanian women, they could identify with her -- she did not have a long career, she was not famous or rich. What made her succeed were her acts every single day. It was her focus and determination that became an inspiration and why cartoonists and columnists have eulogized her in newspapers here this week.

In some ways she didn't choose her cause, it chose her. It's often said it's a struggle that actually ends up defining a person. Nima took that struggle and she owned it, she squeezed it and carried it proudly on the streets and online where her followers posted today that if one thing is for sure, it is that Nima began this campaign and it will live on.

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Huffington Post Blog
By Rana F. Sweis

With a high death toll in Syria, intensified sectarian strife across the region and a sharp rise in conservatism, it's easy to forget why the Arab Spring actually began.

From autocratic regimes to deteriorating press freedoms to consistent corruption, the Middle East was, for the most part, decaying.

The past decades in the Middle East saw a decline not only in literacy and culture -- Arabs comprise almost five percent of the world's population, but publish just 1.1 percent of its books, according to the U.N.'s 2003 Arab Human Development Report - but it is also the consistent regression in human rights.

When Mohammad Bouazizi set himself on fire in December 2010, it was in protest against injustice, harassment and humiliation. In Egypt, 28-year-old Khalid Said died while in police custody. It was the brutality and abuse inflicted upon him that inspired many to take to the streets. Even in Turkey, an economically prosperous country, it was aggression against protestors that prompted outrage across the country.

Even so, human rights issues have taken a back seat as the region continues to face unprecedented change. Despite protests waning, divisions plaguing opposition movements and violence intensifying, one of the biggest challenges facing the Middle East today is the declining state of human rights and the silence of so many democratic governments across the world.

From Qatar to Tunisia, artists such as poets, musicians, bloggers have been imprisoned since the revolutions.

"The willingness of new governments to respect rights will determine whether those uprisings give birth to genuine democracy or simply spawn authoritarianism in new forms," noted Human Rights Watch in its 2013 world report on challenges for rights after the Arab Spring.

"Turning a blind eye to repression may be politically convenient but it does enormous damage to the quests for rights-respecting democracies."

Dozens of social media users have been jailed in the Gulf for posting comments on Twitter.

"I see freedom of expression as a release valve: people have those thoughts, people have those concerns, they want to articulate them and when a government takes an approach (such as jailing dissidents), what you're really doing is forcing those concerns and debate internally, it doesn't go away," said Ross LaJeunesse, global head of Google's Freedom Expression project.

After 16 years of free and unfettered access to the Internet, Jordan blocked nearly 300 news websites this month and enforced an amended press law to regulate online content. And still despite the uplifting of a public assembly law, speech related crimes or simply participating in protests could send you to State Security Court, a special body that has jurisdiction over crimes considered harmful to Jordan's internal and external security -- involving drugs, terrorism, weapons, espionage and treason.

In Egypt, 20 organizations announced the decline in the status of human rights in Egypt since Morsi took office last year -- police beatings, torture, military trials and lack of accountability.

Earlier this year, an Egyptian prosecutor charged Bassem Yousef, a comedian whose satire brings relief to many Arabs bombarded by constant images of war and violence, of maligning president Mohammad Morsi.

Morsi's office claimed the show was, "circulating false news likely to disturb public peace and public security and affect the administration."

For many decades, Arabs were denied a platform for expression and in turn they were plagued by internal fear and self-censorship. There is no doubt, after the Arab Spring, an internal barrier of fear was lifted.

I see this during labor strikes and protests, in art exhibitions and plays that tend to push previous boundaries but where it will all end remains unclear.

Western democracies continue to send a message to people in the Middle East: Security and stability trumps human rights issues. But if there is any lesson to be learned from the Arab Spring, it is indeed that human rights is security.

This post is part of a collaboration between The Huffington Post and The Aspen Institute, in which a variety of thinkers, writers and experts will explore the most pressing issues of our time. For more posts from this partnership, click here. For more information on The Aspen Institute, click here.

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