NEW TACTICS IN POLAND: Increasing Access in Poland and Ukraine

For the team of activists based at the Jagiellonian University Human Rights Centre (JUHRC), an independent institution affiliated with the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, New Tactics materials have offered a new lens through which to look at their work in defending human rights.

To increase access to human rights materials in the region, New Tactics awarded the organization a micro-grant in 2006 in order to fund translations into Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian. Through their website, the center was able to distribute the newly translated materials to various NGOs throughout Poland and Ukraine.

According to one staff member, New Tactics Tactical Notebooks, "encourage the students to look on the problems they come upon in their home countries in a more global perspective."

Moreover, the concept of tactical planning in human rights offers a new approach to the work of many NGOs, which have tended to focus on specific issues rather than on the types of methods and strategies that can be used to confront them.

"It is crucial to see the core of the problem to tackle it in the most effective way and to not get mislead by short term solutions, which concentrate on the consequences and not the reasons," the staff member noted.

Selecting materials for translation, the JUHRC took into consideration the historical and political contexts of Poland and Ukraine. Long periods of communist rule resulted in drastic limitations on individual rights and freedoms, presenting a unique set of issues and challenges.

In light of this, in addition to translating two Tactical Notebooks, the center chose to translate the majority of New Tactics in Human Rights: A Resource for Practitioners as well. The Tactical Notebooks selected were

• Testing for Discrimination: Identifying and Prosecuting Human Rights Abuses, by Bea Bodrogi (now in Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian as well as a version in Georgian)
• Familiar Tools, Emerging Issues: Adapting Traditional Human Rights Monitoring to Emerging Issues, by Jennifer Prestholdt (now in Polish, Russian, Ukrainian).

Despite the rapid growth of non-profits in the region after the collapse of communist governments, many young NGOs have few resources at their disposal. Linguistic barriers often stand in the way of access to valuable resources to human rights workers around the world, an issue considered by the center in their work.

In fact, the dominance of English in the global discourse on human rights actively shaped JUHRC’s translation of the materials. To promote understanding of human rights terminology, which does not yet have any established Polish, Ukrainian, or Russian equivalents, the center chose to quote the original English in specific contexts in addition to translating them. By introducing the original terms into the vocabulary of activists from non-English speaking countries, JUHRC worked to include and expand the global dialogue in human rights.

"The added value [of translation] consists," a spokesman for the center commented, "in putting the materials into everyday practice of various organizations and receiving feedback on its operational value in the same domain, but in different local circumstances. This will enable JUHRC to formulate assessment of the strategies’ effectiveness with regard to specific local circumstances."

Sharing New Tactics materials not only aids the efforts of individual activists and NGOs, but also assists them in developing their own new tactics, ultimately serving human rights workers beyond national, and linguistic, borders.