Tactical Notebooks, volunteer

Side by Side: Protecting and encouraging threatened activists with unarmed international accompaniment

bharris — Fri, 25 May 2007 20:08:14 -0500

Side by Side

by Liam Mahony

Download full notebook below.

Since the mid-1980s, human rights groups and other activist organizations being targeted with repressive abuses have been calling on international NGOs to provide them with direct accompaniment by international field workers. These field workers – usually volunteers – spend twenty-four hours a day with threatened activists, at the premises of threatened organizations, in threatened communities or witnessing public events organized by threatened groups. The international presence serves as a deterrent against the use of violence. In order to ensure this deterrence, these international accompaniment organizations are part of transnational networks poised and ready to mobilize political pressure against perpetrators should their volunteers witness any attacks or should their clients be further threatened.

"I can say with certainty that the fact that we are alive today is mainly because of Peace Brigades’ work." – Luis Perez Casas, Lawyer’s Collective Jose Alvear Restrepo, Bogotá, Colombia

International protective accompaniment is the physical accompaniment by international personnel of activists, organizations or communities threatened with politically motivated attacks. Peace Brigades International has been developing this tactic since the mid-1980s, sending hundreds of volunteers into different conflict situations around the world. PBI currently sustains a presence of about 80 people working in several conflicts, responding to requests for accompaniment from all kinds of threatened civil society organizations.

Accompaniment can take many forms. Some threatened activists receive 24-hour-aday accompaniment. For others the presence is more sporadic. Sometimes team members spend all day on the premises of an office of a threatened organization.Sometimes they live in threatened rural villages in conflict zones. This accompaniment service has three simultaneous and mutually-reinforcing impacts. The international presence protects threatened activists by raising the stakes of any attacks against them. It encourages civil society activism by allowing threatened organizations more space and confidence to operate and by building links of solidarity with the international community. And it strengthens the international movement for peace and human rights by giving accompaniment volunteers a powerful first-hand experience that becomes a sustained source of inspiration to themselves and others upon their return to their home country. This tactical notebook will analyze how protective accompaniment works, based on the substantial experience of PBI in Colombia, Indonesia, Mexico, Guatemala, Haiti, Sri Lanka and El Salvador. Since the 1990s, numerous other organizations have also provided protective international accompaniment in other settings, modifying the approach according to their particular identity and mission. In the final section of the notebook I will also offer a brief comparative discussion of several of these experiences.

*Note: You need Adobe Acrobat Reader to open the files marked with an asterisk (*). You can download a free version of this program from www.adobe.com.

Making the Global Local

bharris — Fri, 25 May 2007 20:08:07 -0500

Making the Global Local: Applying Global Agreements to Local Enforcement of Human Rights Laws

By Columbus Igboanusi

Download full notebook below.

See Phillipe Duhamel's creative take on this resource at interTactica!

In the human rights field, there is often a wide gap between the locus of abuse and the policies, laws and treaties that were created to prevent or stop it. Furthermore, often the discussion of these abuses and the law and policies to prevent them are only talked about in high level policy and diplomatic forums. The tactic presented in this notebook helps bridge these gaps. The League of Human Rights Advocates in Slovakia recruits people from the disenfranchised population – in this case the Roma – to serve as human rights monitors. The monitors learn, often for the first time, about their own rights under national and international law. The LHRA and the monitors then work to enforce those rights –that were signed into existence in far-off capitals–in their own town halls, police stations, schools and communities. The information from local monitors is used to present the true, on the ground, impact of national and international laws in the country. The work done in Slovak may provide each of us with tactical ideas to address similar gaps in each of our communities and countries.

This notebook describes the creation and functioning of a systematic volunteer network of human rights monitors in Slovakia, maintained by the League of Human Rights Advocates (LHRA). The LHRA believes that its grassroots monitoring of local compliance with international human rights commitments assists and encourages the state and its apparatus to live up to its international obligations. The LHRA’s investigatory work, public education efforts and high-level contacts with international human rights NGOs also enable it to put considerable pressure on the Slovak government to live up to its international commitments. The LHRA’s volunteer monitors thus help achieve justice for local Roma people and others suffering human rights abuses. In addition, since LHRA monitors are themselves Roma activists living in Roma communities. The LHRA training process empowers them and their communities to understand and stand up for their rights.

*Note: You need Adobe Acrobat Reader to open the files marked with an asterisk (*). You can download a free version of this program from www.adobe.com.

Expanding Access to Justice

bharris — Fri, 25 May 2007 20:08:02 -0500

by Marcos Fuchs

Download full notebook below.

Until a few years ago, there were no legal firms in Brazil that offered free services to people in need. The Pro-Bono Institute has created a new legal tradition in São Paolo, convincing major law firms to donate their legal services and connecting them with NGOs in need of legal services. The Institute has recruited about 140 lawyers and is offering a variety of free services to all kinds of NGOs, including support for important human rights cases. It has achieved a rapid change in attitude in the legal community and pro bono work has become steadily more popular. This workshop demonstrated how to develop pro bono services in the professional legal community to give NGOs and victims of human rights abuse access to more frequent and better legal services.

The expression pro bono publico is Latin for "for the public interest." The expression is now most commonly used to refer to lawyers or other professionals who offer free services to assist people in need or to promote the public interest. By institutionalizing mechanisms to facilitate such public service, the basic human urge to volunteer time to help those in need can become an integral part of the ethic of an entire profession. The pro bono relationship provides a great benefit to both parties: The clients receive services they might not otherwise afford, while the lawyer receives the satisfaction of using his or her skills for a good cause. As a result of this mutual interest, in some countries special institutions have been created to promote free legal assistance for poor people and charitable nonprofit organizations.

Institutionalized pro bono activities are very strong in places like the United States, Australia and Europe, where most of the top law firms have their own pro bono projects providing assistance to the poor, to immigrants and to NGOs. The institutionalization of pro bono services has a direct benefit for human rights. For one thing, human rights NGOs themselves can benefit from such free services. Secondly, the pro bono movement is responding directly to an often-denied human right: the right to a lawyer. Volunteer lawyers are often interested in providing assistance to victims of abuses. In Brazil some of the most respectable NGOs started their activities during the dictatorship (1964-1989) by assisting victims of the repressive government. Many lawyers were providing free legal support to people detained for political reasons.

Unfortunately, there is huge potential being lost. There is a general openness in the legal profession to offering free services to those who need it most. Yet a great many countries with significant and strong legal establishments have no institutionalized process by which people in need can be linked to volunteer lawyers. Despite the Brazilian experience of legal support to victims of repression, until we created the Instituto Pro Bono in 2001 there was no institution with a mandate and capacity to bring together lawyers offering their services with organizations who might need them. More importantly, there was no built-in ethic or professional expectation that lawyers should offer such services. Unlike in the United States, where it is a basic assumption of the legal profession that a firm will offer a certain percentage of its time pro bono, in Brazil and many other countries this is unheard of.

Voluntary service is a purely personal matter, not related to the firm or to the profession as a whole. The Instituto Pro Bono was created to change this reality: to institutionalize the ethic of pro bono service within the Brazilian legal profession and to create an efficient system for bringing together pro bono lawyers with clients in need. In the long run, we believe that this step will increase access to justice for all Brazilians and assist many worthy NGOs. We want to share this experience with you, as we believe the institutionalization of pro bono services is a step that could have a similarly positive effect in many other countries where it is not yet common practice.

*Note: You need Adobe Acrobat Reader to open the files marked with an asterisk (*). You can download a free version of this program from www.adobe.com.

Engaging Key Stakeholders

bharris — Fri, 25 May 2007 20:08:01 -0500

by Syed Asif Atlaf Chowdhury and Roy Romesh Chandra

Download full notebook below.

In this notebook, we learn about how the development agency CARE-Bangladesh involved key stakeholders, particularly a transport workers’ union, in the task of HIV/AIDS prevention in Bangladesh. Although Bangladesh has one of the lowest HIV/AIDS infection rates in the world, it is surrounded by countries in which the disease is widespread, and many worry that it is only a matter of time before it spreads to Bangladesh. Transportation workers, such as truck drivers, are particularly at risk of contracting and spreading the disease. CARE-Bangladesh worked to gain the trust and respect of the Bangladesh Truck Driver’s Federation and then together implemented a program of advocacy including health education and services through integrated partnership. Particularly important was the cultivation of a sense of ownership of the project on the part of the union, including the employment of paid peer educators and the use of union premises for outreach work and health services. The story of CARE-Bangladesh’s work provides important insights into engaging key stakeholders in advocacy work that is socially acceptable and relevant to the lives and experience of target communities.

Since the first identification of HIV and AIDS, their prevalence has been particularly high in communities situated on transport routes, such as border posts and port towns and cities. The HIV virus spreads as people travel, so transport workers are particularly vulnerable. Although Bangladesh is currently rated 161st of 166 countries and territories in rates of HIV/AIDS, it is in close proximity to Asian countries with relatively high rates. Rather than wait for the epidemic to arrive, CARE-Bangladesh sought a strategy that would prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS.

CARE-Bangladesh recognized that it was crucial to engage transport workers, unions, and companies as key stakeholders in combating the spread of HIV/AIDS. As a result, in partnership with the workers’ union and associations, and with owners of the transport companies, we initiated a behavioural change program to prevent an HIV/AIDS epidemic and to provide quality health care services to transport workers, especially truckers. Because we planned to give the project over to its participants–namely the transport union–after the initial design phase, the primary stakeholders, especially the union, have been actively involved in program development and activities. By holding the union accountable and responsible, CARE-Bangladesh has facilitated a process whereby the workers’ union has become an implementer of health care services, including prevention services, related to sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and HIV.

The active involvement of the union has brought many positive results. Its participation and sense of ownership have been essential in sustaining the program and making it socially acceptable. Union involvement was also instrumental in the scaling up of project activities and the ability to quickly create a nationwide service network.

To address the mobility and needs of some 300,000 transport workers, the program now has 45 Drop-In Centres (DICs) nationwide, each called "Traveller," about 300 paid peer outreach workers, and 25,000 volunteer peer educators (recruited from the transport workers themselves). Approximately 4,000 transport workers receive health services from the DICs each month. The project has also established a system for the social marketing of condoms through Peer Outreach Workers and more than 200 local depot holders. On average, 200,000 condoms are sold through this system every month. The establishment of these DICs not only addresses the mobility of transport workers, but greatly improves their access to effective health care services.

In this notebook we share our experience of engaging critical key stakeholders–CARE-Bangladesh, the transport trade union, and the transport workers–to create a holistic approach to HIV/AIDS education, prevention, and treatment. We hope our experiences will be helpful for others who want to work with community-based organizations, unions, and other civil society actors in the context of their own countries and issues. And we hope this effort will provide a model for establishing effective cross-border interventions as well.

*Note: You need Adobe Acrobat Reader to open the files marked with an asterisk (*). You can download a free version of this program from http://www.adobe.com