By Dan James, Mona Younis, and Molly Judge


On this day in 1948, at the UN General Assembly in Paris, the proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) took place.  The UDHR set out, for the first time in history, a set of universal rights and fundamental freedoms that would protect all people, everywhere. For three quarters of a century, human rights has provided a route for citizens and civil society to hold states to account and provided a language and framework that has shaped social and political norms. Today, we celebrate the declaration and the goal it envisages of states that fully respect the rights and freedoms of all people.  

Challenges to human rights work 

Human rights faces well documented challenges: from authoritarian states that constrain the ability of human rights defenders to operate, to nationalist populism, which seeks to undermine the basic principles of equality and universality of all rights, to seemingly liberal states that “talk the talk” on human rights, but are selective about their implementation. 

Human rights organisations have been key to the human rights movement since its inception. They work to uphold rights through advocacy, monitoring and reporting, research and documentation, legal action, campaigning, and education. In addition to the challenges noted above, civil society organisations that work on human rights face pressures from within the system: limited funding, competition among organisations, and difficulty in demonstrating results and maintaining morale in the context of backlashes and piecemeal progress. In this context, traditional approaches to strategy and planning often steer organisations towards narrowing their focus and setting goals that reflect what is achievable in the short or medium term.  

Rethinking rights impact 

But what is lost when organisations each focus on pieces of the puzzle? We contend that the way in which impact is currently conceived by many organisations and funders inadvertently reinforces unhelpful tendencies that will stand in the way of the long-term changes we seek as a human rights community. We rarely talk about the long view of all rights for all people, let alone when and how we expect to get there. We also ignore the self-evident truth that no single organisation or combination of organisations can deliver this broader, deeper and longer-term impact, and that we must work together as a community to achieve this goal. 

We see a need to rethink how we approach impact. One way we might do this is to map what we need to do as a community of human rights organisations to arrive at our destination in which governments respect all rights fully.

Mapping long-term human rights impact 

INTRAC is currently developing and testing a tool that seeks to address some of these challenges, and re-focus attention on how organisations contribute to the wider movement to realise the long view of all rights for all people.  The tool has two central premises:  

  1. that the long-term success of the human rights movement requires citizens to come to expect and then act to ensure that those who govern fulfil their human rights duties.  
  1. that every human rights organisation, irrespective of its mission, can help advance that citizen engagement in human rights. 

The tool is a way for the staff of organisations that may be focused on specific rights, countries, communities, issues, or methodologies to reflect on their work in relation to what we as a community need to do to achieve the larger, long-term, transformative human rights project. It also aims to provide a language and framework for that internal exploration as well as a way to talk about the long view with supporters and funders. To this end, it identifies seven key areas of transformation for human rights organisations together as a community.  

With support from Oak Foundation, we have been developing this tool that we hope will support such a re-imagining of impact. In the New Year, we will share more about the rationale for the tool and the outcome of initial piloting we completed in October this year. We are currently planning a second, more extensive, piloting phase of work with a range of human rights organisations. We recognise that the change envisaged will not be easy and hope that this is one among many contributions to strengthening the human rights movement, as it was set out over 75 years ago. 

Categories

Blog,

Tags