“We are beckoned to see the world through a one-way mirror, as if we are threatened and innocent and the rest of humanity is threatening, or wretched, or expendable. Our memory is struggling to rescue the truth that human rights were not handed down as privileges from a parliament, or a boardroom, or an institution, but that peace is only possible with justice and with information that gives us the power to act justly.”
John Pilger

Sunday, January 12, 2014

Universal values, foreign money: local human rights organizations in the Global South

By James Ron and Archana Pandya

Open Democracy - 13 November 2013

How important is international funding to local human rights groups worldwide? Oddly enough, there has been little published research on the topic. Pressured by angry nationalists and vengeful governments, human rights activists and donors prefer to keep money questions out of the spotlight.
Indeed, we know of only two existing studies. In 2006, a Nigerian scholar published research on 20 of his country’s 100 human rights groups, the vast majority of which were foreign-supported. Two years later, Israeli researchers published a study based on interviews with 16 of the country’s 26 human rights groups, and said that more than 90 percent of their budgets came from Europe and the United States. Neither study, however, shed light on conditions elsewhere in the world.
To rectify this gap, we began by interviewing 128 human rights workers from 60 countries in the Global South and former Communist region. Then we assembled lists of all the local rights groups we could find in Rabat and Casablanca (Morocco), Mumbai (India), and Mexico City and San Cristóbal de las Casas (Mexico). Our team identified 189 groups in total, all of which were non-governmental, domestically headquartered, politically unaffiliated, and legally registered.
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