With the help of Global Rights’ training and technical assistance, our partners are addressing a wide variety of human rights abuses in their own countries, while also bringing their struggles onto regional and international stages, where institutions such as the United Nations and Organization of American States develop and enforce human rights standards. The stories below highlight some of their important achievements. Please click on the respective links to learn more about our impact in the following countries/programs—Burundi, Natural Resources and Human Rights Initiative and Nigeria.
Burundi
Thousands of innocent civilians were killed between 1993 and 2006, during Burundi’s devastating civil war. While many of the killings were committed by Hutu-dominated rebel movements, a great number were also attributed to Burundian government troops. Despite the fact that such crimes were widely reported by the media and documented in human rights reports, the cases went untried.
During this time, the International Criminal Court (ICC) was formed in The Hague, Netherlands, as the first international court tasked to prosecute perpetrators of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. By June 2003, Burundi was poised to sign the treaty to ratify the ICC and become a member state—one of the court’s few members still in the midst of civil war. While the international community and human rights groups praised the Burundian government for its courageous move toward ratification, it soon became evident that officials were hoping to take advantage of Article 124, a provision in the ICC Charter that, if declared, pardons a state for a period of seven years for crimes committed by its nationals or within the state’s territory. If enacted, Burundi would be exempt from facing charges for alleged crimes committed during the war.
During this time, Global Rights was working in Burundi with Ligue Iteka and other local civil society partners. After learning of the Burundian government’s intent to invoke the article, and with training and technical support from Global Rights, Ligue Iteka launched an intensive effort to pressure the government into ratifying the ICC without exception for war crimes, or without invoking Article 124.
Global Rights worked with Ligue Iteka to bring civil society together to plan an advocacy campaign to prevent Article 124’s invocation. We held several working and mentoring meetings, reviewed draft provisions, and assisted partners’ submissions to members of Parliament allied with the cause. While many civil society groups in Burundi had attended regional and international human rights forums in the past, the use of local advocacy strategies by civil society organizations to affect legislative action on this scale was unprecedented.
The campaign culminated in a parliamentary showdown which forced the minister of foreign affairs to admit that his government had indeed been actively considering declaration of the article. This revelation in the public sphere sparked an intense debate, which ended with the Burundian government signing and ratifying the ICC’s Rome Statues “without any waiver,” abandoning Article 124. The ICC status became effective in Burundi on December 1st, 2004.
Ligue Iteka, emboldened by their role in stopping the invocation of Article 124, continues to introduce and promote the engagement of civil society partners in local advocacy efforts. Demonstrating the long-term impact of this partnership, the national assembly and the senate today are regularly lobbied by these organizations, as well as by many more seeking to emulate Ligue Iteka’s success. Ligue Iteka and other former Global Rights partners in Burundi now regularly meet to conduct annual planning for advocacy at the national parliament around a variety of critical human rights issues. Back to top
Natural Resources & Human Rights Initiative (NRHRI)
In December 2008, Global Rights' NRHRI staff travelled for the first time to the Republic of Guinea (Guinea)—the world’s top bauxite producer and home to significant gold reserves. During our field mission, we visited remote communities affected adversely by industrial gold mining, with the hope of identifying what local populations viewed as the main problems associated with gold extraction and to assess interest and opportunities for addressing these issues from a human rights–based perspective.
The visit was carried out in collaboration with a local civil society organization, the Centre du Commence International pour le Développement (CECIDE), a group that expressed interest in grounding its extant work on natural resource exploitation at the community level. Our trip led us to the vibrant grassroots efforts of the Association des Ressortissants de Baraka (ARDEBA), whose members were working to defend the interests of the community vis-à-vis industrial mining projects in the region. The visit was the first of its kind for CECIDE and helped inform the direction that the two organizations’ work would soon take.
In March 2009, Global Rights organized a regional seminar in Pointe-Noire, Republic of Congo (Congo) on economic and social rights in the context of natural resource exploitation. The event was held in collaboration with the Commission Justice et Paix and the Rencontre pour la Paix et les Droits de l’Homme. Fifteen members of seven civil society organizations from Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Guinea—including CECIDE and ARDEBA—traveled to Pointe-Noire to participate in an intense four-day workshop in which they received training on the scope of relevant economic and social rights contained in regional and international human rights instruments; the obligations of state and non-state actors, such as corporations, in upholding and fulfilling these rights under international law; and the most appropriate methods at the national, regional and international levels to address issues affecting communities, including monitoring and documentation, community mobilization, legislative and policy advocacy, or strategic litigation. They also shared experiences in addressing the human rights impacts of resource extraction in their respective countries and the challenges they faced.
For CECIDE and ARDEBA members, the seminar was a formative step in shaping their future work. In fact, since Global Rights first visited Guinea in 2008, our partners have begun articulating injustices in mining communities as human rights issues requiring increased state and corporate accountability. Their accomplishments thus far have included organizing a civil society symposium to shed light on various injustices and human rights violations occurring at the local level; exposing civil society members to the international human rights framework and that framework’s relevance to events taking place in their communities. The resulting local pressure on the government to act in the best interests of its people culminated in an official delegation to investigate alleged abuses, and the mining company in question committing to repair recently polluted water wells and to improve rehabilitation efforts on affected areas.
Our partner, ARDEBA, continues to engage the company and government in improving living conditions for surrounding neighboring communities. Most recently, their efforts resulted in the creation of 200 jobs for locals in response to common complaints that industrial mining does not generate sufficient employment for local populations. Back to top
Nigeria
Since 2008, Global Rights has been engaged in extensive cooperative work with twenty nascent human rights organizations in the underserved northern Nigerian state of Bauchi. Through training on topics such as basic human rights principles and international standards to monitoring and documentation of human rights violations, Global Rights has built the capacity of local organizations, such as the Fahimta Women and Youth Development Initiative, to realize their missions to increase access to justice, advance literacy and education for youth, and provide reproductive health and social services to the most vulnerable populations in the region.
As a direct result of these training sessions, twenty of Global Rights’ training partners—alongside other Bauchi-based NGOs—formed the Bauchi Human Rights Network, or BAHRN. The group’s members share information, coordinate approaches and projects, and collectively raise awareness about various topics such as women’s and children’s rights, political and civil rights, rights for the disabled, and prisoner’s rights. Additional training programs in bordering Kano State have yielded similar results, including the formation of a Kano-based network similar to BAHRN.
Since its formation, BAHRN has demonstrated great promise and initiative by actively pursuing programs to serve the community. The network has conducted trainings on matters ranging from gender equality rights for women to rights awareness education for victims of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. These trainings— formulated to increase knowledge of one’s rights under the Nigerian constitution—will strengthen civil society groups’ ability to confront human rights abuses in their region using the constitution as their vehicle to achieve reform.
The trainings have attracted large groups of participants, with sizable numbers of women, minorities, and other disadvantaged groups in attendance to understand their rights under the Nigerian Constitution. Importantly, BAHRN members have applied for and received funding from donors such as the National Endowment for Democracy, and the network itself is quickly becoming an independent force in its own right.
As a result of BAHRN’s advocacy efforts in the region, Bauchi state has seen the establishment of the Citizen’s Protection Directorate within its Ministry of Justice to monitor and document prisoners’ living conditions. With BAHRN’s steady track record and growing influence, and its growing capacity to monitor and document human rights violations, citizens in the region—particularly women—have been turning to the network at an increasing rate to report human rights abuses regarding those topics covered by the trainings—growing six-fold, from two reported cases per month to the current twelve, and growing, thereby proving that their awareness-raising efforts are succeeding. Back to top
