The Advocates for Human Rights

The Advocates for Human Rights works to create systems change, strengthen accountability, raise awareness, foster tolerance, and help individuals more fully realize their inherent rights. The Advocates has a long history of developing innovative and sustainable strategies to hold governments accountable for human rights abuses and strengthen institutions in the international justice system.

Working with global partners, The Advocates for Human Rights:

Calls attention to human rights abuses through advocacy intiatives;
Partners with diaspora communities and human rights defenders in other countries to eliminate abuses;
Spearheads transitional justice to help countries and people recover from conflict;
Recruits, trains, and integrates volunteers around the world into our advocacy work;
Leads volunteers on international fact-finding trips to document human rights violations;
Assists post-conflict countries to move to peace and accountability; and
Expands individual and group access to the United Nations and other international organizations that hold governments accountable.
We hold Special Consultative Status with the United Nations, and we participate in regional human rights mechanisms in many different countries. At the United Nations, we:

Present oral and written statements to charter-based bodies, such as the Human Rights Council;
Participate in UN review of compliance with human rights treaties through shadow reporting; and
Provide expert technical advice.
We also participate in regional human rights mechanisms, such as the African Commission on Human and People's Rights.

Partnering to Promote, Protect Human Rights
Through our international monitoring missions, we produce reports on the rights of children, women's human rights, harassment of human rights defenders, military and police abuses, restrictions on freedom of the press, and other human rights abuses. Since 2002, The Advocates has adapted human rights monitoring methods to support social justice causes in countries such as Peru, Sierra Leone, and Liberia.

Women's Human Rights Work
Our international work regarding women's human rights is especially vital. We travel to countries worldwide to:
Document human rights abuses against women;
Change laws to better protect women;
Monitor implementation of the laws; and
Advocate for amendments to strengthen those laws.
The Advocates has partnered with organizations in more than 20 countries in Central and Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, the Caucasus, Central Asia, Morocco, Nepal, Mexico and Haiti, and in Minnesota. Staff and volunteers conduct in-country research through close collaboration with local women's non-governmental organizations, using traditional human rights fact-finding methods to document violations of women's human rights.

We offer monitoring tools and resources to help bring human rights violations to light and to hold those responsible for human rights violations accountable.

The Advocates for Human Rights represents refugees and immigrants, advocates for legal reform, and works to help better integrate our newest residents into communities.

Legal Services
The Advocates is the largest provider in the Upper Midwest of free legal services to low-income asylum seekers, refugees, and immigrants. Thanks to our powerhouse of volunteer and staff attorneys, paralegals, and law students, we provide free legal services to more than 500 people each year. Supported by expert staff, our volunteer attorneys mentors, medical and psychological professionals, and interpreters work with our clients. We also serve people clients through legal advice clinics and the Minnesota Detention Project.
We assist those who:

are afraid to return to their home country;
are seeking asylum;
are a detained immigrant;
are trafficked for either labor or sex;
have suffered from unjustified detention, or mistreatment while in detention

Legal Reform
The Advocates works for immigration policies that reflect human rights principles. We:

Provide cutting-edge research, reports, and information about immigration issues;
Advocate against the U.S. detention system;
Monitor immigration-related legislation in the United States and in our home state of Minnesota;
Report on United States' compliance with human rights obligations, including due process, freedom from arbitrary detention, respect for the unity of the family, protection of refugees, and protection of workers;
Advance and utilize impact litigation to reform immigration law; and
Submit complaints and reports to international bodies, including the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detetion.
Immigrant Integration
The Advocates works to combat anti-immigrant sentiment. We provide information and make presentations to community organizations, faith-based groups, immigrants, students, and the general public about immigration to the United States, counter myths about immigration, and to support welcoming communities. We recently published a groundbreaking report Moving from Exclusion to Belonging: Immigrant Rights in Minnesota Today.

Policy Reports
In addition to Moving from Exclusion to Belonging: Immigrant Rights in Minnesota Today, many other reports are available on our website's "Publications" section, in which reports are organized by topic.

HUMAN RIGHTS EDUCATION
The Advocates for Human Rights is at the forefront of developing educational tools that help people learn about and apply international human rights standards in their families, schools, workplaces, and communities. We believe that education is one of the best ways to ensure long-term improvements in respect for human rights everywhere.

For Educators
Find free curricula, lesson plans, toolkits, and a wealth of materials on various human rights issues. Teachers can also access professional development resources.

For Students
Access interactive, youth-friendly resources on human rights, including online video games, take action ideas, thought-provoking films, and more.

For Advocates
Discover resources, tools, and trainings that help individuals and organizations learn about human rights issues and apply a human rights approach to their own social justice work.

For Attorneys
Take advantage of a variety of opportunities to earn CLEs.

ADVOCACY
The Advocates for Human Rights works to create public policy that respects, protects, and fulfills human rights obligations in our home community and around the world. Our advocacy priorities are protecting the human rights of asylum seekers, refugees and immigrants; protecting the human rights of women and girls; supporting the work of human rights defenders; and working to abolish the death penalty.

Three of our many current campaigns focus on:

Central American Refugees
Thousands of people—mostly children who traveled alone and mothers with children—fled their home countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras for safety in the United States. They traveled one of the world's most dangerous migrant routes, where the risk of rape, robbery, beatings, and being trafficked for sex is common. The dangers confronting them do not end when the reach the U.S. border; the U.S. response endangers their human rights.

President's Executive Action on Immigration
President Obama announced on November 20, 2014, executive actions to address problems in our immigration system including an expansion of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and the creation of the Deferred Action for Parental Accountability (DAPA) program. Learn more about the subject and how you can take action.

Driver's Licenses for All Minnesotans 2015
Minnesota values safe roads where all drivers are licensed and insured. Safe Roads MN, of which The Advocates for Human Rights is a member, is working to achieve the goal of allowing everyone, regardless of a person's immigration status, to apply for a driver's license.

The Sankhu-Palubari Community School (SPCS) in Nepal provides a free education — from pre-K through grade 10 — to the neediest children in this rural Kathmandu Valley area. Founded by The Advocates for Human Rights and operated in partnership with Educate the Children-Nepal and the local community, the school gives a genuine alternative to child labor and a brighter future.

Beginning its first year with 50 students, SPCS now has more than 340 students enrolled. In 2014, the third class of students that began kindergarten at the school graduated from 12th grade. All graduates have continued on to study at a university in Nepal.

The SPCS curriculum includes Nepali, English, grammar, math, science, and social studies. Extracurricular opportunities include poetry, art, music, Nepali dance, speech, and sports. Students also learn the fundamental principles of human rights through “Alfulai Chinau,” a human rights curriculum developed especially for the school. The school also provides a daily meal, health checks, and immunizations for all students.

The Need
An estimated 2.6 million Nepali children between the ages of 5 and 14 are child laborers. Children work in in dangerous conditions in brickyards, carpet factories, and quarries, or in agricultural and domestic work. Nepali children are also vulnerable to being trafficked to India.

Because Nepali public schools generally charge administrative fees and fees for books, exams, and uniforms, struggling families like those in the Sankhu-Palubari community cannot afford to educate their children. (When the school opened in 1999, more than 50 percent of the 10,000 of the community's residents were unemployed.) Uneducated and illiterate, children grow up to be impoverished adults, continuing the cycle of poverty.

Many students are members of Nepal’s most marginalized indigenous groups and lower castes — such as the Dalit — who might otherwise be forced to work. SPCS promotes equal access to education for low-income families, and welcomes children regardless of caste, ethnicity, or gender.

Another SPCS focus is supporting girl students so that they stay in school. Currently, more than 50 percent of students at SPCS are girls, a huge gain in the percentage in place when the school first opened. The school has made remarkable strides towards gender parity in a country where education of girls is often not valued equally with education of boys.

Death Penalty
The Advocates for Human Rights opposes the use of the death penalty throughout the world.

International Advocacy
As part of our International Justice program, we serve on the steering committee of the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty, an alliance of more than 150 NGOs, bar associations, local authorities, and unions from around the globe.

We chair the World Day Against the Death Penalty working group. (The World Day Against the Death penalty is held each year on October 10.)

We are active with the World Coalition’s advocacy and play a leadership role with the organization. We have presented at the World Coalition’s annual General Assembly on issues, including the death penalty as cruel, unusual and inhuman punishment; death penalty education; and reparations for exonerees.

We conduct international advocacy at the United Nations and African Commission. The Advocates makes submissions to U.N. human rights bodies on the death penalty, including reviews of Cameroon, Central African Republic, Malaysia, Japan, Iraq, Iran, Morocco, Jamaica, Malawi, and the United States. These reports highlight issues in these countries, such as:

Execution of juvenile offenders;
Death sentences for non-violent crimes, such as drug offenses;
Use of cruel and inhuman methods of execution, such as stoning;
Harsh death row conditions;
Discrimination; and
Lack of an adequate remedy for the wrongfully convicted.
The Advocates also participates in on-the-ground advocacy at the United Nations in Geneva during these reviews.

Education
The Advocates educates about the death penalty. We have produced the Death Penalty Abolition Toolkit, consisting of an international fact sheet, U.S. fact sheet, quiz, take action guide, resource guide, glossary, and testimonials. Our staff and volunteers frequently make presentations and participate on panels about the death penalty.

Efforts in The Advocates' Home State of Minnesota
The past decade has seen several attempts to revive the death penalty in Minnesota, an abolitionist state since 1911. In the latest attempt, bills were introduced in the Minnesota legislature in 2003 and again in 2004. The Advocates and Minnesotans against the Death Penalty responded, and lined up witnesses to testify against the measure. Witnesses included religious leaders, murder victims’ family members, lawyers, and exoneree Kirk Bloodsworth. The bills failed to make it out of either legislative chamber. Since that time, there have been no viable attempts to reinstate the death penalty. The Advocates remains poised to oppose any efforts.