10 years ago, Civil Rights Defenders launched the Natalia Project, the world’s first assault alarm and community-based security system for human rights defenders. In the event of an attack, participants in the project can send out a distress signal so they can be located quickly and get help.
Natalia Project participant Génesis Dávila is the director and founder of Defiende Venezuela, a human rights organisation fighting for accountability and justice for victims of political persecution, people in arbitrary detention, and others who have been subjected to government-sanctioned attacks in Venezuela. In Venezuela being a human rights defender puts Génesis at risk of the very same political persecution she is trying to document.
“I face different threats on a daily basis. In general, they come from the Venezuelan regime. They harass human rights defenders because we try to protect people who are in danger and victims of human rights violations. This is something that puts us at great risk.” “It is really exhausting because then you don’t have space for other things. It’s the feeling of being chased all the time. It puts you under stress. You feel that you are never safe, wherever you are.”
In the case of an attack, the alarm is activated, and a distress signal goes off. Civil Rights Defenders and a network of human rights defenders can start investigating the situation within minutes.
“For me, my Natalia has been a game changer. It helped me feel safe. Just having this tiny device with me, knowing that there was someone on the other side of the world just waiting for my call, being ready to act if something happens gave me such a confidence. That changed everything.”
The Natalia Project device is built to be durable and easy to use and take wherever is needed.
“Everywhere I go, I bring my Natalia. If I’m about to fly somewhere, I check my passport, cellphone and my Natalia. It makes me feel safe. It’s my lucky charm.”
“Anyone who wants to support human rights can do it. You don’t have to be a lawyer, or someone waving a flag. You just need to advocate for human rights, and that will be enough.”
In a Blog Post (Council on Foreign Relations of 18 December 2023) Raquel Vazquez Llorente argues that ‘Artificial intelligence is increasingly used to alter and generate content online. As development of AI continues, societies and policymakers need to ensure that it incorporates fundamental human rights.” Raquel is the Head of Law and Policy, Technology Threats and Opportunities at WITNESS
The urgency of integrating human rights into the DNA of emerging technologies has never been more pressing. Through my role at WITNESS, I’ve observed first-hand the profound impact of generative AI across societies, and most importantly, on those defending democracy at the frontlines.
The recent elections in Argentina were marked by the widespread use of AI in campaigning material. Generative AI has also been used to target candidates with embarrassing content (increasingly of a sexual nature), to generate political ads, and to support candidates’ campaigns and outreach activities in India, the United States, Poland, Zambia, and Bangladesh (to name a few). The overall result of the lack of strong frameworks for the use of synthetic media in political settings has been a climate of mistrust regarding what we see or hear.
Not all digital alteration is harmful, though. Part of my work involves identifying how emerging technologies can foster positive change. For instance, with appropriate disclosure, synthetic media could be used to enhance voter education and engagement. Generative AI could help create informative content about candidates and their platforms, or of wider election processes, in different languages and formats, improving inclusivity or reducing barriers for underdog or outsider candidates. For voters with disabilities, synthetic media could provide accessible formats of election materials, such as sign language avatars or audio descriptions of written content. Satirical deepfakes could engage people who might otherwise be disinterested in politics, bringing attention to issues that might not be covered in mainstream media. We need to celebrate and protect these uses.
As two billion people around the world go to voting stations next year in fifty countries, there is a crucial question: how can we build resilience into our democracy in an era of audiovisual manipulation? When AI can blur the lines between reality and fiction with increasing credibility and ease, discerning truth from falsehood becomes not just a technological battle, but a fight to uphold democracy.
From conversations with journalists, activists, technologists and other communities impacted by generative AI and deepfakes, I have learnt that the effects of synthetic media on democracy are a mix of new, old, and borrowed challenges.
Generative AI introduces a daunting new reality: inconvenient truths can be denied as deep faked, or at least facilitate claims of plausible deniability to evade accountability. The burden of proof, or perhaps more accurately, the “burden of truth” has shifted onto those circulating authentic content and holding the powerful to account. This is not just a crisis of identifying what is fake. It is also a crisis of protecting what is true. When anything and everything can be dismissed as AI-generated or manipulated, how do we elevate the real stories of those defending our democracy at the frontlines?
But AI’s impact doesn’t stop at new challenges; it exacerbates old inequalities. Those who are already marginalized and disenfranchised—due to their gender, ethnicity, race or belonging to a particular group—face amplified risks. AI is like a magnifying glass for exclusion, and its harms are cumulative. AI deepens existing vulnerabilities, bringing a serious threat to principles of inclusivity and fairness that lie at the heart of democratic values. Similarly, sexual deepfakes can have an additional chilling effect, discouraging women, LGBTQ+ people and individuals from minoritized communities to participate in public life, thus eroding the diversity and representativeness that are essential for a healthy democracy.
Lastly, much as with social media, where we failed to incorporate the voices of the global majority, we have borrowed previous mistakes. The shortcomings in moderating content, combating misinformation, and protecting user privacy have had profound implications on democracy and social discourse. Similarly, in the context of AI, we are yet to see meaningful policies and regulation that not only consult globally those that are being impacted by AI but, more importantly, center the solutions that affected communities beyond the United States and Europe prioritize. This highlights a crucial gap: the urgent need for a global perspective in AI governance, one that learns from the failures of social media in addressing cultural and political nuances across different societies.
As we navigate AI’s impact on democracy and human rights, our approach to these challenges should be multifaceted. We must draw on a blend of strategies—ones that address the immediate ‘new’ realities of AI, respond to the ‘old’ but persistent challenges of inequality, and incorporate ‘borrowed’ wisdom from our past experiences.
First, we must ensure that new AI regulations and companies’ policies are steeped in human rights law and principles, such as those enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In the coming years, one of the most important areas in socio-technical expertise will be the ability to translate human rights protections into AI policies and legislation.
While anchoring new policies in human rights is crucial, we should not lose sight of the historical context of these technological advancements. We must look back as we move forward. As with technological advancements of the past, we should remind ourselves that progress is not how far you go, but how many people you bring along. We should really ask, is it technological progress if it is not inclusive, if it reproduces a disadvantage? Technological advancement that leaves people behind is not true progress; it is an illusion of progress that perpetuates inequality and systems of oppression. This past weekend marked twenty-five years since the adoption of the UN Declaration on Human Rights Defenders, which recognizes the key role of human rights defenders in realizing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other legally binding treaties. In the current wave of excitement around generative AI, the voices of those protecting human rights at the frontlines have rarely been more vital.
Our journey towards a future shaped by AI is also about learning from the routes we have already travelled, especially those from the social media era. Synthetic media has to be understood in the context of the broader information ecosystem. We are monetizing the spread of falsehoods while keeping local content moderators and third-party fact-checkers on precarious salaries, and putting the blame on platform users for not being educated enough to spot the fakery. The only way to align democratic values with technology goals is by both placing responsibility and establishing accountability across the whole information and AI ecosystem, from the foundation models researchers, to those commercializing AI tools, and those creating content and distributing it.
In weaving together these new, old, and borrowed strands of thought, we create a powerful blueprint for steering the course of AI. This is not just about countering a wave of digital manipulation—it is about championing technology advancement that amplifies our democratic values, deepens our global engagement, and preserves the core of our common humanity in an increasingly AI-powered and image-driven world. By centering people’s rights in AI development, we not only protect our individual freedoms, but also fortify our shared democratic future.
While the war rages in Gaza, the media focus is understandably on the conduct of the war and the many victims. Still, it is good to focus on the role of HRDs and that is what Front Line Defenders has done on 15 December 2023.
Front Line Defenders has been receiving reports from human rights defenders in Gaza, the West Bank and Israel on an ongoing basis in recent months, updating on the dire circumstances they have been facing since 7 October 2023.
The occasion of UDHR@75 has let to many articles on its relevance to today’s world, which sees such a ‘heightened risk’ of mass atrocities due to global inaction and a diminished UN ‘responsibility to protect’ principle and ambition to prevent genocides, as stated by Julian Borger in the Guardian of 8 December 2023. These warnings come on the 75th anniversaries this weekend of the Genocide Convention and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, both signed in the aftermath of the Holocaust in the hope that the world would act in concert to prevent a repeat of such mass slaughter.
Borger describes also in some detail how the USA’s ambition to stop atrocity crimes had “diminished in terms of its saliency within the administration as a guiding principle”
Two pieces in Geneva Solutions look at the UDHR closer:
One is by Pip Cook: “Universal Declaration of Human Rights: fit for the 21st century?” and the other by Marc Limon “After 75 years, what is the UN human rights system’s theory of change?”
The first starts with a good overview of the birth of the UDHR and then states: …”With the world facing human rights challenges on so many fronts, some might be tempted to dismiss the declaration as idealistic or unrealistic – a non-legally binding document that nations may claim to adhere to on the international stage but disregard entirely depending on their own political agendas. However, defenders of the UDHR argue that to judge it on how often it is violated is to miss its point altogether.
“I’m not sure how much the document can be judged on whether it’s always adhered to or not,” said Felix Kirchmeier, executive director of the Geneva Human Rights Platform. “That question comes up in human rights all the time, but it comes up much less in other domains. Nobody would ask whether health policy was still valuable now that we have the pandemic.”
“I think the declaration might be even more needed now than ever because it allows us to really see these core values and the universal approach to them,” he added. “The proof of its relevance is the fact that despite all violations of human rights and despite all the attacks to the universal validity of human rights, the document itself is not being disputed in any serious way,” he continued. “So I think that’s also proof of its strength.”
….Ultimately, perhaps the greatest value of the declaration is that it gave universal human rights a language. Known as the most translated document in the world, available in 500 different languages, it provides a rhetoric that people from all corners of the world still use to this day..
Pip closes with the words of Eleanor Roosevelt in her speech to the UN to mark the tenth anniversary of the declaration in 1958. Her words captured the reason why human rights are for every one of us, in all parts of our daily lives, as well as the world as a whole. “Where, after all, do universal human rights begin?” she began. “In small places, close to home – so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighbourhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm or office where he works.
The second piece by Limon – executive director of the Universal Rights Group - asks: …”Yet two equally – if not more – crucial questions linger: what was the Universal Declaration’s theory of change, meaning how did its authors intend for it to improve the situation of human rights for all “the Peoples” of the UN, and has the UN succeeded in translating the universal norms into local reality?”
Different actors have developed markedly different theories of what the UN human rights system is, what it is supposed to do, and how it is supposed to improve the situation of human rights at the national level.
For some, the system is mainly for the benefit of developing countries, and its principal utility is to respond to serious human rights violations and hold abusing states accountable. Its main purpose, in other words, is to protect human rights.
For others, it is a universal system in which all states should be treated equally. It is there to engage with them through cooperation and dialogue to gradually improve human rights laws, policies and practices over time, including through the delivery of international capacity-building support. The system’s main objective here is, in other words, to promote human rights.
For some, human rights norms should be in a constant state of progressive development, even in sensitive issues such as sexual orientation and gender identity, or sexual and reproductive health and rights, and should be imposed by the UN. Where states resist, it is because they are not committed to human rights and should be called out and forced to catch up.
For others, the UN is there to provide a platform where states can reach a common understanding of universal human rights norms. This is what happened in the case of the UN’s recognition of the right to a healthy environment. After that, it can provide capacity-building and technical support to help those countries making insufficient progress…
So, who is right? There is some truth to both views. For example, the mandate of the Human Rights Council explicitly includes both the protection and promotion dimensions of human rights. And therein lies the answer – the international human rights system, built from the foundations of the Universal Declaration, embodies different – yet complementary – theories of change.
The simple truth is that human rights change cannot be imposed from the outside, by certain states or even by the international community as a whole, without the consent of the state concerned. Bottom-up demands for change, for example, led by local civil society, can and frequently do succeed in securing improvements in the enjoyment of human rights, especially in democracies.
However, in many countries, the power imbalance between civil society and governments means that NGOs and local communities, acting alone, can be easily ignored or even suppressed.
Over a decade of the Universal Rights Group’s research shows that a winning approach, instead, is to combine top-down pressure for improvement with bottom-up calls for change within a framework that is accepted by the state or government and of which it feels a sense of ownership…
While the international human rights system, therefore, encapsulates different and complementary theories of change (think “carrot and stick”), for a vast majority of states, the vast majority of the time, the former theory of change is the most relevant.
As we celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, there are increasing signs, from states (both developed and developing), civil society, the secretary general, the high commissioner, UN resident coordinators and others, of a shift towards a common understanding of this predominant theory of change. Building on that shared understanding and thereby effectively translating universal rights into local reality would truly be the best way to mark the adoption of this historic document.
Since its adoption, the U.N. established in 2000 a Special Rapporteur to report on the situation of HRDs, and more than 60 countries now have laws, policies, or protection mechanisms to protect HRDs.
Some countries, including the United States, sometimes sanction those who target HRDs with financial penalties and visa bans. Mechanisms like these are important, but they can be slow and used selectively, says Michael Breen of Human Rights First in Just Security of 9 December 2023.
Perpetrators often feel so protected from legal accountability that they openly threaten and attack HRDs. In 2022, more than 400 defenders were killed for their human rights work. This year the number killed is likely to be higher…In our work with HRDs, they often recommend public exposure of those who target them as one step that can be taken for their protection.
Breen states that It is on a reputational level that perpetrators can be most vulnerable and provides several examples.
“We are working with HRDs to create a more international approach of social accountability. We will share research on the social circles in which their attackers move, or that they want to join. We will be compiling lists of who has received awards from where, engaging with institutions about publicly rescinding awards, and otherwise publicly causing embarrassment to perpetrators.This is largely new territory for human rights NGOs, and we will work closely with HRDs in assessing any additional risks produced by socially targeting their attackers.“
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On 11 December 2023 Global Witness published a blog post: “Land and environmental defenders protect our planet – but they cannot halt climate change without access to justice“
“For more than a decade, we’ve been documenting and celebrating the hard-fought wins of land and environmental defenders worldwide. Together, their efforts not only help to prevent environmental destruction and human rights harms by companies, but also help to protect the environment from the worst effects of climate change.”
“Defenders globally continue to face reprisals after speaking out to protect the environment. At least 1,910 land and environmental defenders around the world have been killed since 2012, with 177 cases in 2022 alone. Of these killings last year, 88% occurred in Latin America – a region consistently found to be the most dangerous place in the world for activists.”
“Impunity is consistently named as a key driver behind attacks on defenders by the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders, Mary Lawlor, whose office has repeatedly noted how failures to properly prosecute perpetrators have fueled further attacks. This is no coincidence. Every perpetrator who walks free sends a fatal message to defenders and activists worldwide.”
“The future of our planet depends on the continued stewardship of Indigenous people over their ancestral land, with Indigenous practices cited as protecting 80% of the world’s biodiversity. We simply cannot meet the 1.5°C limit and prevent devastating consequences on human life without the efforts of environmental defenders.”
Less well-known is the name of painter Xiao Liang, although “Bitter Winter” reported in December 2022 that he had been detained for “painting the portrait of a dangerous person.” The “dangerous person” was Peng Lifa. At that time, neither “Bitter Winter” nor the painter’s wife and friends knew what exactly happened to Xiao Liang after the police took him away from his home in Nanchang city, Jiangxi province. But the repressive system of the CCP did not forget him.
On December 7, 2022, Xiao was formally arrested by the Donghu District Procuratorate of Nanchang City with the accusation of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” now a popular charge against all kind of dissidents. His wife was submitted to long interrogations as the police tried to prove that Xiao was part of an organized anti-CCP group.
Relatives and friends have now learned and posted on social media that Xiao was sentenced to one year and three months in jail for the crime of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” In addition to his portrait of Peng Lifa, the painter was considered a “troublemaker” by the authorities for his paintings and posters supporting the Ukrainian resistance against Russia, a staunch ally of the Chinese regime.
On 8 December, 2023 the United Nations lead agency on international development, UNDP, posted its commitment to human rights:
..Protecting our rights to do so was enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 75 years ago, and it has been our North Star for human rights ever since. The past three years have been defined by crises on a global scale. Conflict is at its highest since the Second World War. From Gaza to Ukraine, Sudan and Myanmar, people’s right to live without fear is being undermined. Climate change, brought about by humanity’s own actions, is stripping away the right of our children to a healthy and prosperous future. The COVID-19 pandemic brought to stark light the value of the right to health for all.
Three-quarters of a century on, we are at an important inflection point, where we must recalibrate and reconnect with the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights if we want to shape a future that lives up to its vision. Doing so will not be easy. It will require action across many different spheres of life. Recognizing this, UNDP is prioritizing seven key areas where it is working to strengthen human rights.
Dignity and equality of rights is needed for all people and the rights of people living in crisis and conflict must be assured
If we don’t invest in human rights, we won’t achieve the Sustainable Development Goals
Ninety percent of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) targets align with the obligations outlined in international human rights frameworks. However, halfway to the 2030 deadline, development progress and the realization of Agenda 2030 is under threat due to the combined impacts of climate change, conflict, overlapping energy, food and economic shocks, and lingering COVID-19 effects. Human rights can be part of proactive solutions helping to address contemporary development challenges and pushing progress towards Agenda 2030. By adopting a human rights-based approach, UNDP is working to ensure that no one is left behind as we strive for sustainable development. For example, UNDP has worked to promote synergies between human rights and SDG systems in eight countries, including Sierra Leone, Uruguay and Pakistan, boosting both the efficiency and effectiveness of national efforts to advance human rights and sustainable development.
Human rights defenders must be able to speak out without fear
Human rights defenders face alarming threats, including intimidation and reprisals, in the pursuit of a goal that should be a shared aspiration for all – the creation of fair and peaceful societies. In 2022, there was a 40 percent increase in the killings of human rights defenders, journalists, and trade unionists compared to 2021. UNDP works with civil society, human rights defenders and national human rights institutions around the world to ensure those that want to speak out have the freedom to do so. In Thailand, UNDP conducted a study looking into the protection of human rights defenders at the request of the Ministry of Justice.
Young people must be included in efforts to protect the rights of future generations
Business can be a powerful driver of sustainable development, offering access to social and economic opportunities and a pathway to prosperity for many.
Human rights and the environment are interconnected
In the next 25 years, building resilience to biodiversity loss and climate change will be key to the realization of all human rights – including the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment.
Digital technology must unite, not divide
Technology can be a great enabler of equality and development by improving connectivity, financial inclusion, and public services, positively impacting the realization of human rights. But it can also have a dangerous downside, exacerbating existing inequalities and vulnerabilities. While over 80 percent of developed countries have access to the internet, only 36 percent of individuals in least-developed countries are online. UNDP puts human rights at the centre of its Digital Strategy, and supports countries to harness digital technology as a means to advocate for, protect, access, report on, and exercise human rights…
Today, 9 December, marks 25 years of the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights Defenders (HRDs). It provides for the support and protection of HRDs, and for many HRDs it’s been a useful marking in legitimizing and supporting their work.
The anniversary is a good time to reflect on what’s working and what isn’t for HRDs, and we discussed some of these issues on a Human Rights First webinar a couple of days ago.
In many ways it was a different world in 1998. Celine Dion and the Backstreet Boys were the big rock acts then. The internet, mobile phones, and digital surveillance of HRDs, were all in their infancy.
For HRDs, much has changed, and it’s possible to see 25 years of success as HRDs have achieved some great things. They’ve changed laws, won the release of people from prison, distributed humanitarian aid, exposed corruption, documented and publicized human rights violations.
For some HRDs just keeping going despite pressure and threats is success in itself. Hundreds are killed every year for their peaceful work on behalf of others, for embarrassing corrupt officials, for making good things happen.
But there is now a greater recognition of the value of the work of HRDs than there was in 1998, and a better understanding of who they are. The family of HRDs has expanded in the last 25 years – back then NGOs discussed whether those working on environmental rights, or those documenting corruption, or medics working in war zones, really counted as HRDs. Now we know they do.
We better understand too the responsibilities of businesses to protect HRDs, and that defenders working on certain issues face specific threats, that those working on land rights, indigenous rights or environmental rights away from big cities are most likely to be murdered. We know too that many defenders are targeted not just for what they do but for who they are.
Women Human Rights Defenders experience added layers of harassment. They’ve always lived with pressure from society in terms of what they should get engaged in and not, pressure from their families on what a woman should do or not, and since 1998 there’s now added pressures in the digital sphere. They are targeted more than other HRDs with digital harassment, which we see very often leads to physical attacks offline.
Our organizations share a similar approach to working with HRDs. The NHRF supports HRDs working for NGOs outside big cities, often formed by people from the community that they work in. It supports organizations where women are in leaderships roles, and provides resources over the long term. For instance, the NHRF works with an NGO in Thailand originally formed by young women to organize their community in the face of a mining company. Most of these women are now grandmothers, but still keep up their human rights work.
The NHRF also works with organizations of HRDs in Indonesia made up of family members of those killed and tortured in in the 1960s who are now seeking redress and working against impunity.
Human Rights First, meanwhile, continues its decades-long work on Northern Ireland, also working with bereaved families of those killed during the conflict in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s who are also looking for redress and working against impunity.
For many HRDs achieving success is a long road, requiring perseverance and allies. International standards and rules aren’t protecting them enough. Their work needs to be better understood, and better funded.
The picture for HRDs since 1998 is mixed, and no doubt will be for the next 25 years. HRDs will achieve more successes, but unless governments find the political will to implement the protections of the HRD Declaration, more defenders will be attacked, jailed and murdered.
So, what do the next 25 years hold for HRDs? The future is hard to predict, but one thing we can say for sure is that HRDs will continue to be, as the UN Special Rapporteur for HRDs Mary Lawlor says, ordinary people doing extraordinary things.
In these times, when many people from Gaza to Ukraine question the power of the human rights framework to actually protect people’s rights, everyone with power must ensure that HRDs can be funded, protected and supported. We will all be better off for it.
On Friday 8 December 2023 the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said that more people were killed due to homicide than armed conflict and terrorism combined in 2021, with an average of 52 lives lost per hour worldwide. The Global Study on Homicide analyzes the complex dynamics behind these violent deaths and includes a special section on how organized crime is driving death rates up in Latin America and the Caribbean.
The report examines homicides related to criminal activities and interpersonal conflict, as well as “socio-politically motivated homicides” such as the deliberate killing of human rights defenders, humanitarian workers and journalists.
UNODC chief Ghada Waly said the loss of thousands of lives each year to homicide is “a sombre reminder” of the collective failure of the international community to reduce all forms of violence by 2030, in line with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The report revealed that during the period from 2019 to 2021, an average of roughly 440,000 deaths worldwide were due to homicide – more than conflict-related or terrorist killings combined.
UNODC said 2021 “was an exceptionally lethal year”, marked by 458,000 homicides. The spike was in part linked to economic repercussions from the COVID-19 pandemic and to a rise in organized crime and gang-related and socio-political violence in several countries.
Organized crime accounted for 22 per cent of homicides globally, and 50 per cent in the Americas, where competition among organized crime groups and gangs can spark a sudden and sharp rise in “intentional homicides”, as has happened in Ecuador and Haiti.
The Americas also lead the world in highest regional homicide rate per capita, with 15 per 100,000 population in 2021, or 154,000 people.
Africa had the highest absolute number of homicides at 176,000, or 12.7 per 100,000 population, “and available data suggests that the homicide rate is not falling, even as decreases have been registered in other regions,” the report said. Meanwhile rates in Asia, Europe and Oceania were far below the global per capita average of 5.8 per 100,000 population in 2021.
Firearms were used in most killings in the Americas in 2021, or roughly 75 per cent, whereas in Europe and Asia they were involved in 17 and 18 per cent of homicides, respectively.
Men accounted for 81 per cent of homicide victims and 90 per cent of suspects, but women are more likely to be killed by family members or intimate partners. “Although they represent 19 per cent of homicide victims in total, they account for 54 per cent of all killings in the home and 66 per cent of all victims of intimate partner killings,” UNODC said.
Aid workers under attack
The data also showed that the deliberate killings of human rights defenders, environmental defenders, community leaders, journalists, and aid workers represented nine per cent of global homicides. “The threat has increased for humanitarian aid workers, who witnessed a higher average number of fatalities over the period 2017-2022 than 2010-2016,” the authors said.
On 5 December 2023, Natalie Samarasinghe – global director for advocacy at the Open Society Foundations. – wrote about strengthening human rights based on David Griffiths’ paper, Barometer in Context: Strengthening the Human Rights System.
….But this is not the whole story. The Open Society Barometer, a poll of over 36,000 people in a representative group of countries, found that most people believe in the value of human rights. Over 70 percent said that human rights “reflect the values I believe in” and are “a force for good” in the world.
Actors such as human rights lawyers, NGOs, and international organizations continue to provide hope, support, and redress to those seeking justice and protection. And they are joined by a growing cohort of others, from rural communities to indigenous peoples, political and social movements. They may not use the language of rights but their work is grounded in them. They cannot afford to have theoretical debates about the relevance of the UDHR. They need support and solutions.
To mark the UDHR’s anniversary, Open Society commissioned a paper on what those solutions might look like, written by David Griffiths, an advocate and policy expert with more than two decades of diverse experience across the human rights movement. His paper, Barometer in Context: Strengthening the Human Rights System, sets out a series of proposals for how to make this moment count, including prioritizing economic inequality and climate change, exposing the failure of authoritarians to deliver, defending civic space, rethinking migration, widening accountability, and strengthening the human rights system.
Drawing on 18 months of research and material from at least 65 interviews with people from all parts of the world, as well as the Open Society Barometer, these proposals provide inspiration for those of us approaching this anniversary with a heavy heart. It is vital that we avoid paralysis and gloom, which only plays into the hands of abusers and authoritarians.
We must become more creative in how we support those defending rights, whether they are in the courtroom or community center, or on the streets marching for debt relief and climate justice. We must invest in the leaders and tools of tomorrow, instead of playing catch-up with authoritarians, while doubling down on our backing for traditional actors and approaches that continue to deliver results.
And now more than ever, we must nurture a global movement—of the sort that was not possible in 1948—to reaffirm the simple truth that lies at the heart of the Declaration: that all human beings are equal, that every life has value.
Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards 