A common perception of human rights organizations is that either they undertake quasi-political campaigns against repressive states or they make painstaking forensic investigations into crimes against humanity. Some of their tactics are well-known: letter-writing campaigns for political prisoners, protests outside government buildings and international meetings, reports that document the tortured, the dead, the disappeared. At international forums, most notably the United Nations, human rights organizations are known for their input to the careful wording of resolutions, declarations, condemnations, and statements of concern.
Some independent human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have become known throughout much of the world on account of the depth and scope of their activities. Others, like the Peoples' Union for Civil Liberties in India, have become household names in their own countries, winning recognition and respect for their campaigns that could be as diverse as banning landmines, ending child labor, or reforming election laws.
Differing Strategies, But a Single Goal
Human rights organizations can be classified according to the strategies they employ. The first distinction is between documentation and education. Human rights documentation outfits gather evidence of instances of torture, execution, discrimination and provide this information to those who can take action on specific cases or on the general conditions that permit abuse.
Human rights education is pursued to engage victims, potential victims, and the public at large about the meaning of human rights and its relevance to one's daily existence. Constituencies also may differ. Some human rights groups work directly with victims; others build national and international support networks that alleviate the isolation of persons living under repression.
But there is neither competition nor contradiction between human rights documentation and education. Truth Commissions, such as the one that helped South Africa begin its transition from apartheid to democracy, are an example of how documentation became a public exercise whose primary function was not to punish but to reveal and educate.
The People's Tribunal movement, which in the last two decades has successfully exposed racism, environmental catastrophe, and corporate apathy in India, creates a public forum in which citizens consider evidence of injustice when the legal system has failed to act.
The Asian Charter, to cite yet another example, was drafted in consultation with Asian citizen organizations and published in 1998, in order to refute their governments' dismissal of the universality of human rights as a western intellectual contrivance. It is an outstanding example of how documentation and education organizations are collaboratively defining and strengthening an entire sector of civil society.
As this variety of issues, tactics, and partners suggests, what classifies a "human rights organization" is not only the type of work that it does, but the perspective that it takes. To attack a problem from a human rights perspective is to seek structural change in the relationships among three parties; victims, abusers, and those charged with establishing and protecting the public good (the difficulty often lies in extricating the second group from the third).
Rescuing and rehabilitating bonded child workers, for example, takes on a human rights perspective when it involves attacking and rooting out systemic causes, the cultural, economic, political, or legal forces that tolerate such servitude. For a human rights organization, untying the structural knots that allow children to become bonded workers is just as urgent a concern as pulling individual children out of factories, rescuing them from hardship, and sending them to school. Progressive human rights work is always structural; even if recording or ending individual cases of abuse is an immediate goal, eliminating the conditions from which abuse arises is the larger and guiding mission.
Structural change requires not only dismantling laws and institutions which do not work, but replacing them with new institutions, new laws, and new ideas. Although human rights organizations are often perceived as being essentially negative on contrary – opposing a law, blocking a dam, condemning violence, punishing wrongdoers – the best among them are, by nature, constructive. They seek to write better laws, to find universally acceptable solutions, to replace violence with understanding, and to rehabilitate rather than condemn.
This need for systemic change – as opposed to improving services or "raising awareness" – is what makes human rights so compatible with social entrepreneurship, which is also devoted to the transformation of social structures. Human rights issues are by definition complex, involving cultural values about right and wrong, social history of the relationships among groups, and targeted changes to legal systems. And correcting long-standing injustice, prejudice, and oppression requires more than the intercession of a few activists or advocates; it is a step that entire groups of people have to make together, led by those most deeply affected.
A Simple Question of Belonging
To belong. This simple aspiration is perhaps the most concise expression of the meaning and the power of human rights. Human rights are a universal statement of every person's belonging to a single category, human being, with unlimited potential for commonality, sympathy, empathy, and equality among its members. And human rights define the many manifestations of belonging: people have the right to belong to a race, religion, people, nation and place. Inversely, we have the right to absorb those categories into ourselves; race and culture and belief and community belong to the individual, just as the individual belongs to the group.
If the basic human right is the right to belong, then the basic human affliction is a matter of belonging to some category of person – a nation, creed, caste, class, or color – whose equality has been thrown into question, and for whom empathy had been suspended. Ethnic chauvinism, torture, statelessness, religious persecution, state-sponsored violence, environmental destruction, poverty, hunger, squalor, war, repression, militarization – all are abuses that erupt from fundamental conflicts over belonging to one group or not belonging to another.
An important mission of the international human rights movement has been to define this "right to belong" among victims, abusers, and bystanders. Particularly challenging is the task of creating and sustaining local movements in which victims define their right to belong. One technique, creative and simple, is to invent a new category of belonging for people who have been denied their rights. An organization or campaign offers membership, not just services or sympathy, to victims of human rights abuse and to their supporters. The strategy is simple: to turn the category "victim" into an asset, a rallying point for solidarity and action, rather than a shameful stigma.
Such "human rights membership organizations" have several characteristics. In the spectrum of civil society, they resemble trade unions more than conventional non-governmental organizations, in that the organization and the constituency are one in the same. Unlike a service organization that works with a large population but which maintains the distinction between staff and target group, a membership organization is large by design, and is set up to develop broad leadership from among the community of members, the dispossessed.
Membership is defined by members' relationship to an immediate problem. They might be ethnic minorities who are poorly served by the courts, or farmers whose livelihood is threatened by a new dam, or men and women united against domestic violence. Some define a population in a region and work on the various human rights issues. Others are single-issue organizations. What makes them similar is not the object of their attention, but the organizing methods they employ.
Entrepreneuring the Future
This issue of Changemakers features three social entrepreneurs who have built membership organizations to help people promote human rights through structural change.
Stanny Jebamalai's People's Organizations have become a groundswell of popular support for legal reform and participation among tribal peoples in western India. These mass groups evolved as Jebamalai searched for new ways to engage villagers in legal reform. While community organizers and "barefoot para-legals" were making headway on individual legal cases, he realized that along with the need to resolve issues was the need to renew identity. Everything in Indian society had been persecuting people for their tribal, or adivasi, identity: their land rights were ignored; their legal recourse was shunted; their neglected communities were left to wallow in abject poverty. In fact, by the time Jebamalai arrived in Gujarat this historical marginalization had become so ingrained that it had become part of the people's own identity. Members of the P.O.'s pushing for legal reform, transparency in public works programs, and accountability among police and forestry officers in ways unimaginable to the region a decade ago.
Charles Maisel is also building popular momentum for change, aiming his "5 in 6" program at the odious and pervasive domestic violence plaguing South Africa's Western Cape. He organizes women and men in a public campaign to create among men a culture that despises abuse and among women a program for communal support and economic independence. If the one-sixth of men who beat their wives and daughters are a secret fraternity, then the way to counter them is to organize the other five-sixths into a movement that declares most men's intolerance of domestic abuse. At the same time, "5 in 6" is fostering a movement of savings and investment clubs that gives women the economic and political power, and solidarity, needed to successfully fight abuse. Maisel's message is also one of belonging: men too belong to the group of people who should care about women's rights; and the rights of women, as equal citizens, belong in the public domain.
Solidarity is just as important among people whose human rights issues are already in public view. Pedicab drivers in Indonesian cities have been trying to keep their trade alive despite the pressures – real or contrived – of modern urban planning. The association Jumadi organized, SORAK, comprises not only pedicab drivers, but vendors who pull carts through the streets, motorcycle taxi operators, and other independent workers who depend on small vehicles and public roads. If the Indian and South African examples show grassroots organizations geared primarily towards promoting the civil and political rights of groups and individuals – access to law in one case and personal security in the other – then the work of Jumadi in Indonesia demonstrates that membership organizations are also effective for promoting economic rights.
Each case demonstrates how human rights organizations redefine "community," traditionally associated chiefly with locale, to mean the group of people struggling for justice on any issue. While Jebamalai's People's Organizations collect people of similar ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and local backgrounds, they also create an overarching sense of community among people, and peoples, who may never otherwise meet.
"5 in 6" organizes men according to their values and beliefs about domestic violence – building a new community of those who think alike. Jumadi's organization of workers who, facing similar threats to their livelihoods, have often been at odds with one another first builds a sense of community and mutual interest among them and then draws from their collective strength.
November 2001 Journal Home Page