Posts Tagged ‘Dejusticia (NGO)’

Dejusticia 2025 fellowships for defenders from the Global South

December 20, 2024

Members of the 2024 cohort of our Global South Defenders program.

This opportunity allows human rights defenders from countries in the Global South who are in emergency or high-risk situations to develop their projects and participate in an academic and cultural exchange in a safe space.

There are 14 thematic areas within Dejusticia to whichyou can apply.

The fellowship will begin in the second semester of 2025.

Who is eligible to be part of the program?

We seek human rights defenders from the Global South who meet the following criteria:

  • They come from an emergency or high-risk context. This includes regions affected by armed conflict, civil unrest, or authoritarian regimes, where there is an imminent threat to the security of the grantee. This may involve situations where the grantee and/or their organization have been subjected to threats, intimidation, or populist propaganda, or where they have been excluded from funding due to government or private sector influence.
  • The grantee may be at risk of burnout and is seeking a quiet place to continue working on human rights issues, but in a different context.
  • They belong to human rights organizations in the Global South that are interested in engaging in exchanges and joint research or advocacy work with Dejusticia.
  • They aim to build lasting relationships with other fellows and with Dejusticia. This ensures that our fellowships function as acceleration hubs for connections that will make the human rights movement more cohesive and impactful.

What will fellows receive from Dejusticia?

Dejusticia will cover travel expenses (visa, tickets) and provide a monthly stipend based on the fellow’s profile and experience. Although Dejusticia will offer support at the beginning of the process, including a two-week training period on applied research and on the fellow’s specific work, it is important to note that fellows will be responsible for managing their stipend to cover housing, transportation, and food expenses.

What are the commitments of the Global South Fellow?

The fellow will allocate their time at Dejusticia as follows:

How to apply for the fellowship program?

Before January 31, 2025, please fill out the form

CF: 2024:

Dejusticia: Fellowship Program for Human Rights Defenders from the Global South

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Dejusticia: Fellowship Program for Human Rights Defenders from the Global South

June 26, 2024

On 25 June 2024, Isabel de Brigard and Christy Crouse described this fellowship programme taking place in Bogota:

Dejusticia’s work as part of the human rights movement has always been carried out alongside individuals and partner organizations with whom we have collaborated to advance various agendas. The value of these encounters drives us to constantly seek ways to better articulate our work with leaders, activists, and professionals from different areas of the human rights movement in Colombia and different countries of the Global South. As part of this effort, the Fellowship Program for activists and human rights defenders from the Global South was born. With this program, we seek to generate South-South collaboration ties that are sustained over time and contribute both to building a more coordinated and organized civil society, as well as supporting the individual efforts of those who work for global justice on a daily basis.

What does the program entail? Dejusticia provides fellowships for cohorts of 5 to 8 human rights defenders who come to Bogota, Colombia, to live and work here for periods of 3 to 6 months. They are integrated into one of Dejusticia’s teams to work with its researchers on collaborative projects. The program offers fellows a collaborative and creative space to reflect on various relevant issues, strengthen their work in the struggle for social and environmental justice, and get inspired by new strategies, approaches and possibilities of transformative actions. 

For those who in their places of origin often face risks derived from the work they do, Dejusticia offers a quiet and safe space for research, advocacy, and fellowship with those who share their struggles. The program is a useful opportunity for exchange, in which those who come to Dejusticia can explore our tools and action-research strategies to enrich the work they do in their home countries, while Dejusticia learns from their experience and that of their organizations.  

A new kind of profile for fellows 

The program we designed at Dejusticia takes a slightly different approach. We look for human rights defenders and activists with three key characteristics: (1) people who are at risk due to threats, armed conflict, an authoritarian government, or obstruction of their work; (2) people who may be at risk of burnout from their job; and (3) people linked to a human rights organization in the global south that is interested in working with Dejusticia. 

This approach has allowed us to receive people from Brazil, India, Mexico, Nigeria, Turkey, Venezuela, among other countries. Our fellows are professionals and activists in political science, law, sociology, communications, and more, many with extensive experience, as well as people who are just beginning their careers. Welcoming each of the people who have participated in the program has been an opportunity to add hospitality to the strategies with which we seek to strengthen the human rights movement in the Global South. And in the same vein, programs like this one are a fundamental part of our efforts to strengthen the voice and presence of actors from the Global South in debates, academic production, and the setting of human rights agendas.

Cohort 2023

In the second semester of 2023 we had a cohort of fellows whose time with Dejusticia was enormously enriching. 

Jorge Lule, for example, is a political scientist and public administrator from Mexico, specializing in public security issues and conflict analysis. He has worked on issues of militarization, drug policy, serious human rights violations and international crimes. During his fellowship at Dejusticia, he collaboratively wrote an article, with a researcher of the Transitional Justice line, regarding the serious crisis of disappearances and the search for missing persons faced by both countries. This text was published in Dejusticia’s Global Blog and in the Mexican news portal Animal Político. 

Another fellow, Danielly Rodriguez, comes from Venezuela and is an activist and social documentarian. She has a long history of telling the stories of  Venezuelans, their struggle against authoritarianism and in favor of human rights. She has been working in the field of human rights for more than 11 years, especially through documentary photography. According to her, the fellowship at Dejusticia helped her understand other contexts of human rights situations, both in the countries of the other fellows and in Colombia. It also confirmed her belief that although we are separated by borders, there are situations that affect us in very similar ways.

Miracle Joseph comes from Nigeria and joined the tax justice team. With a background in geography, he specializes in economic, social and behavioral geography, focusing on the connections between government policies and social patterns. His main project at Dejusticia was an investigation that aimed to understand how corruption affects the advancement of human rights and sustainable development in Nigeria, focusing on health, education and climate change.

Finally, Fabian Hernandez is a young activist from the Colombian Caribbean region with campesino roots, linked to the peasant resistance movement in the department of Cesar. He is active in social movements, especially in the struggle for the recovery of land, water and ecosystems. Fabián strengthened his research skills and exchanged tools with Dejusticia’s Land and Peasant Rights team, which he joined during his stay. During this time he wrote a text on autonomy and peasant resistance in the Sumapaz region and organized a discussion with peasant leaders from different parts of Colombia to discuss the challenges and stakes in agroalimentary farming territories.

Having these four talented and committed people be part of our team in 2023 was a great privilege and an opportunity to learn and build valuable partnerships. By the middle of 2024 we will have a new cohort, which will continue to enable us to strengthen the knowledge, experiences, and collaborative networks essential to the work of those of us who fight for global justice.

https://www.dejusticia.org/en/fellowships-program/

https://www.dejusticia.org/en/human-rights-in-the-global-south/

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Tang Prize recipients in rule of law category make clear the challenges they face

September 21, 2020
On 21 September 2020 William Yen reported in Taiwan Focus on the Tang Prize 2020. Three NGOs that have won the 2020 Tang Prize for their significant contributions to the rule of law participated on-line in the Tang Prize Masters’ Forum in Rule of Law, organized by the Tang Prize Foundation and National Taiwan University’s College of Law. [see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tang_Prize]
See also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2016/06/22/2016-tang-prizes-to-louise-arbour-and-us-sinologist/
They are:
  • The Bangladesh Environment Lawyers Association (BELA),
  • The Colombian Dejusticia: The Center for Law, Justice and Society, and
  • The Legal Agenda, Lebanon.
Syeda Rizwana Hasan, chief executive of BELA, which promotes environmental justice and works toward sound environmental jurisprudence, said :”Corporate interests often take over public interests and the state loses its entity as a regulator and sides so much with the corporation that you can’t really differentiate which one is the state and which one is the corporation,”. This greatly impacts NGOs, as 430 environmental human rights defenders in Bangladesh were killed last year because they were fighting against mining projects or defending the rights of indigenous communities, Hasan said. See also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2014/04/27/abu-bakar-siddique-released-but-worries-remain-for-human-rights-defenders-in-bangladesh/ “Authoritarian regimes are increasingly branding NGOs as foreign agents, enemies of the state and anti-development elements. They are trying to criminalize our entity and our functioning, they are trying to seize powers so they can assess our performances and delicense us if we go against their developmental narratives,” Hasan said.

Rodrigo Uprimny Yepes, co-founder of Dejusticia, which aims to strengthen the rule of law on issues such as discrimination against race and gender, said the challenges his organization, like many other NGOs will face in the future, will be the question of how to obtain financial sustainability without losing independence.

Samer Ghamroun, co-founder and current board member of The Legal Agenda, which focuses on promoting the independence of the judiciary and defending the rights of vulnerable groups, said that while religious equality is guaranteed in Lebanon, many other individual rights are sacrificed. “So religious equality coexists with social economic inequalities, huge social economical inquiries and lack of respect for individual rights,” Ghamroun said.

Yeh Jiunn-rong a professor at National Taiwan University, chair of the Tang Prize selection committee for the rule of law and moderator of the forum, expressed his gratitude for the organizations in sharing with Taiwan and the world their activisms and values. “Thank you very much to the representatives of these three laureates for the 2020 Tang Prize for Rule of Law,”.

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