Maryam Al-Khawaja is a Bahraini-Danish human rights campaigner and the former Co-Director of GCHR. She lives in exile from Bahrain due to several pending legal cases against her in relation to her human rights work. She is currently campaigning for the release of her father, Danish-Bahraini human rights defender Abdulhadi Al-Khawaja, who has been imprisoned since April 2011 in severe conditions which have led to his repeated hunger strikes. Maryam Al-Khawaja was named as one of the 100 inspiring and influential women from around the world for 2023 by the BBC.

In September 2023, Maryam Al-Khawaja was barred from boarding a British Airways flight to Bahrain for a visit that she had publicly announced to pressure the Bahraini authorities to release her detained father, Abdulhadi Al-Khawaja.

On 19 February 2024, Maryam Al-Khawaja announced publicly in a video that she had Hodgkin’s lymphoma, stage 3 blood cancer, and that she was beginning a series of sit-ins in front of the Danish Prime Minister’s office in Copenhagen with two demands close to her heart, to help free her father, and to fight for a ceasefire in Gaza. She continues this work to this day, having gone into remission.