Making Human Rights Change

Abstract

Human rights belong to all people, but they are not equally respected, protected, or fulfilled in different communities and countries. Achieving a world in which all humans are equal in dignity and rights requires challenging the people and power structures that perpetuate oppression, inequality, discrimination, and injustice. This chapter explores the people, processes, and places of human rights change. It explores the best practices of human rights advocacy and investigates the strengths and weaknesses of existing mechanisms of human rights monitoring and enforcement. These include human rights defenders, domestic and international human rights NGOs, transnational advocacy networks, government human rights foreign policy, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Human Rights Council, and UN special procedures and treaty bodies. The chapter also highlights the organizing work of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a farmworker and labor rights group that fights labor exploitation, and Gambia’s ground-breaking genocide case against Myanmar at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).