Why New Tactics?

While great advances have been made in human rights advocacy over the past 50 years, human rights abuses remain widespread and persistent. According to Amnesty International’s 2002 report, an estimated 111 countries still practice torture or ill-treatement - about the same number as in 1974, when Amnesty International began its first Campaign Against Torture. Millions of people still lack protection of their basic human rights, as outlined by the United Nation’s Declaration of Human Rights. From a tactical perspective, the international human rights community has largely responded in two ways:

• setting human rights standards (conventions and treaties)
• monitoring standards for compliance

Such tactics have set the stage for global human rights advocacy. But as our understanding of human rights issues deepen, so does the need to rethink our strategy. In working with torture victims, CVT has discovered that human rights abuses tend to occur in highly complex contexts, which in turn require thoughtful, complex solutions. That’s why the more tactics we can choose from, the more effective our efforts to address human rights issues will be! Thinking strategically - and choosing the most appropriate tactics to fit within a strategy - is the challenge before us all.